A brief history of Bitcoin and its Founders
Mitchell
Bitcoin – ‘a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash’, is a digital, decentralised cryptocurrency born in 2008 by a person, or group of people, using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. Officially launched in January 2009, Bitcoin became the world’s first widely used and accepted cryptocurrency. Being a peer-to-peer online currency, this means that all transactions happen directly between equal, independent network participants, without the need for any intermediary to permit or facilitate them. Bitcoin was created, according to Nakamoto’s own words, to allow “online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” Some concepts for a similar type of a decentralized electronic currency precede BTC, but Bitcoin holds the distinction of being the first-ever cryptocurrency to come into actual use.
Bitcoin’s original inventor is known under a pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto. As of 2021, the true identity of the person — or organisation — that is behind the alias remains unknown. On October 31, 2008, Nakamoto published Bitcoin’s whitepaper, which described in detail how a peer-to-peer, online currency could be implemented. They proposed to use a decentralized ledger of transactions packaged in batches (called ‘blocks’) and secured by cryptographic algorithms — the whole system would later be dubbed “blockchain.” Just two months later, on January 3, 2009, Nakamoto mined the first block on the Bitcoin network, known as the genesis block, thus, launching the world’s first cryptocurrency.
However, while Nakamoto was the original inventor of Bitcoin, as well as the author of its very first implementation, over the years a large number of people have contributed to improving the cryptocurrency’s software by patching vulnerabilities and adding new features. Bitcoin’s source code repository on GitHub lists more than 750 contributors, with some of the key ones being Wladimir J. van der Laan, Marco Falke, Pieter Wuille, Gavin Andresen, Jonas Schnelli and others.