The market is a big stage, and not all stories can be told. People need a certain belief to motivate and constrain them. People can be calm and then calm, and they can be calm and determined. In the past, only smiling with no regrets was beautiful; only smiling with tears in a game was colorful; only success or failure was wonderful by smiling with strength!

I believe that many friends who have just entered the currency circle only know that Bitcoin is a currency and know nothing about its development process. In fact, this is not a good phenomenon. Understanding a currency The director believes that the process of its creation is necessary. This will give you deeper insights and understanding in the currency circle! So now let me introduce the origin of Bitcoin to my friends.

1. Embryonic period: (2008~2010)

In 2008, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in the United States triggered a financial crisis that spread to the world.

On October 31, 2008, a geek named Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" (Bitcoin: A Peer- to-Peer Electronic Cash System), the concept of "Bitcoin" appeared in front of the world for the first time. In this paper, Satoshi Nakamoto described a distributed ledger and the peer-to-peer circulation model of Bitcoin.

On January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto dug up the first batch of Bitcoins on a small server in Helsinki, Finland. The genesis block was born, and Bitcoin was born.

However, in the initial period, when this fantastic idea came true, it did not attract many people to try it, because of the value of Bitcoin and whether the technology behind Bitcoin is trustworthy. The question remains puzzling. Therefore, there were very few people mining on the Bitcoin network at that time.

A critical moment came in May 2010, when a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas worth $25 for 10,000 Bitcoins. The pizza incident seems unbelievable today. People will be shocked that those 10,000 Bitcoins were only exchanged for two meals. But its significance is extremely far-reaching, because this transaction means that Bitcoin has a price and exchange rate for the first time, and this is also the first case of using virtual currency to pay for real goods. In July, Bitcoin was reported by technology media Slashdot for the first time, attracting a large number of users.

Since then, Bitcoin has really been taken seriously by people and entered the public eye.

Community elders such as Satoshi Nakamoto are not like those who later regarded Bitcoin as a tool of profit. They relied on their trust in Bitcoin and liberal idealism. Without them, Bitcoin or Turn the pearl into dust. Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to say that Bitcoin is a product of liberal beliefs.

2. Growth period: (2011~2014)

In 2011, other currencies began to appear in the digital currency market, such as Litecoin, which later competed with Bitcoin. Since the technical code of Bitcoin is open source, many currencies were established based on the Bitcoin code and modified. The currencies born in this way were later called altcoins. Most of the altcoins, like Bitcoin, can only be used for mining and transfer, and have no other specific use cases, so they all declined later.

Some of the altcoins that have survived to this day have not been abandoned because of their specific application scenarios or eye-catching technologies, such as Dogecoin, Litecoin, etc. However, with the continuous development of blockchain technology Development and the emergence of various new projects have gradually declined and become marginalized.

In this year, two other major events happened. First, Mark Karpeles took over the Bitcoin exchange Mt. Silk Road was established, starting the dark trajectory of Bitcoin.

As there are more and more Bitcoins on the market, the trading volume has also increased. The Bitcoin exchange Mentougou, established in 2010, suddenly occupied 70% of the global trading volume, becoming the largest at the time. Exchange. However, due to poor management, Mentougou's trading system appears to be extremely fragile. Several maintenance and optimization attempts have failed to help, and withdrawals and services have often been suspended.

In June 2011, Mentougou was attacked by hackers for the first time. However, since then, the operators of Mentougou have never been able to solve the loopholes in their trading system. They have been stolen many times but concealed the facts, and constantly suspended services and frozen them. The transaction is disguised as a mistake. The price of Bitcoin on its platform rises and falls at an exaggerated rate, with a very wide floating range. Mentougou is often prone to problems at this time, making it difficult for users to manage and operate their accounts.

In February 2014, the price of Bitcoin on Mentougou plummeted by 80%, but it was once again difficult for users to withdraw their money; soon after, Mentougou suspended its trading business and withdrawal functions as usual.

The long-simmering anger of users finally broke out, but it was of no avail because Mentougou had already run out of gas and disclosed on the 25th that 850,000 Bitcoins had been stolen.

850,000 Bitcoins were stolen in Mentougou, which became the biggest news in the currency circle that shocked the world at that time, and also became an indelible event in the history of Bitcoin development. After the bankruptcy of Mentougou, the price of Bitcoin plummeted, and users who suffered huge losses also began a difficult road to safeguard their rights. As soon as this incident came out, the Bitcoin market was severely shaken. People's trust in Bitcoin and exchanges dropped to a freezing point. They also had serious doubts about the concept of decentralization promoted by Bitcoin and blockchain. The entire industry began to be shrouded in uncertainty. In the midst of a dark cloud.

Bitcoin suffered a huge loss after the Mentougou incident, and the price of the currency remained depressed for a long time. Two years later, with the recovery of the entire cryptocurrency market, Bitcoin has regained its vitality; the darknet has also ushered in two years of stability, and the circulating Bitcoins still occupy the largest share of the entire Bitcoin trading market. share.

3. Expansion and bifurcation period: (2014~2017)

After the altcoin trend, many projects began to focus on the application of digital currency beyond peer-to-peer transactions. Blockchain The expansion of application fields has begun. For example, BitShares, the first decentralized exchange that was influenced by the previous centralized exchange like Mentougou, adopted a new encryption code and identification mechanism, and the distribution mechanism also adopted the then-emerging ICO (Initial Coin Offering) , initial coin offering), similar to a public offering in the stock market, using tokens as stocks for financing.

ICO first appeared in 2013. Mastercoin (OMNI) was one of the earliest blockchain projects to conduct ICO. The initial ICO raised Bitcoin, which has the highest market value. This distribution method has caused countless projects to follow suit. However, there is also a general situation of uneven quality among ICO projects, and many projects are scams.

In 2014, Ethereum was established, ushering in the milestone of blockchain 2.0. The development and application of public chain technology allows blockchain and digital currency to be applied to a wider range of scenarios. Although Ethereum uses the PoW* recognition mechanism, the distribution of the token "Ethereum" is also in the form of ICO, and has achieved great success, becoming the second largest digital currency with a market value only after Bitcoin.

The expansion problem of Bitcoin has not been solved for a long time, which has harmed the interests of many miners. The core development team, the backbone of the Bitcoin community's technical force, proposed Segregated Witness (SegWit). After unanimous negotiations between developers and miners at the time, the "Hong Kong *** Consciousness" was finally reached: first conduct Segregated Witness on some blocks, and then The non-isolated part is expanded to 2M for isolation.

The prosperity of ICO and forked coins is a symptom of the prosperity of the entire blockchain market, and chaos is also emerging in endlessly. The emergence of air projects and air coins dazzles speculators and cannot distinguish them. . At the same time, the lack of supervision has also exacerbated the emergence and rampage of these chaos.

At the end of 2017, the price of Bitcoin surged, reaching a peak of $19,299 on December 18. As the leader of digital currencies, Bitcoin reflects the trend of the entire cryptocurrency market, so various tokens have surged along with the market. Throughout the winter, the cryptocurrency market has been in full swing.

4. Period of Confusion: Blockchain 3.0 Era (2018)

After the New Year of 2018, the soaring market began to fall, but it has not bottomed out for nearly half a year. The market has begun to enter a cold winter. During this year, the market value of Bitcoin has also shrunk significantly, but the Bitcoin network is still operating normally.

Many people in the currency circle are beginning to be confused again, and many projects are beginning to be panicked. However, blockchain technology has never stopped, and the blockchain 3.0 era has arrived. In addition to the financial and commercial public chain fields, the tentacles of blockchain have begun to extend to non-commercial fields, entering into various fields of social life such as copyright, data, medical care, food, and rental housing.

Although the blockchain industry in general is still in its infancy, for Bitcoin, it seems to be old. Bitcoin will still run smoothly, but the limitations of its application scenarios will make Bitcoin gradually become a means of preserving value.

However, will the development of Bitcoin itself stagnate or stop here? Generally speaking, some people are not worried at all and think that this is the best destination for Bitcoin. It is not only the currency with the largest market value in circulation, but also a symbol and belief; while some people think that with the development of blockchain technology With continuous development and widening of application scope, Bitcoin will gradually lose its current status and be replaced by later currencies.

It is difficult to say what the future of Bitcoin will be.

Five and ten years: pursuit and doubt coexist

After nearly ten years of development, Bitcoin has also gained many recognitions around the world. Some countries have already accepted Bitcoin and will It is regarded as a payment method with the same status as legal currency.

Even though it has received a lot of recognition, in different countries, there is still a wait-and-see attitude or even resistance to digital currencies like Bitcoin. Many people believe that although Bitcoin is supported by blockchain technology, its technical value is gradually decreasing compared with current and future technologies; Bitcoin does not have specific application scenarios as support and is, after all, a In the market bubble, many business tycoons, such as Buffett, Jack Ma, etc., have shown a negative attitude.

In the past ten years, Bitcoin has been both pursued and questioned. Many people later changed their views and believed that it was not a scam. There are also many people who firmly believe that Bitcoin is still a bubble. But until now, Bitcoin is still the vane of the digital currency market and is still the most well-known digital currency.