Bitcoin is the world’s leading cryptocurrency. It is a peer-to-peer currency and transaction system based on a decentralized consensus-based public ledger called blockchain that records all transactions.
Now Bitcoin was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 but it is a product of decades of research on cryptography and blockchain and not the work of just one person. Having a limitless, decentralized currency based on blockchain has been the dream of cryptographers and free trade advocates. With the growing popularity of Bitcoin and other altcoins around the world, their dream has now become a reality.
Now in 2009 the cryptocurrency was first placed on a consensus-based blockchain and was traded for the first time in the same year. In July 2010, the price of Bitcoin was only 8 cents and the number of miners and nodes is quite small compared to thousands right now.
In the space of a year, the new alternative currency has risen to $1 and it is becoming an attractive prospect for the future. Mining was relatively easy and people were making good money and in some cases even getting paid with it.
Within six months, the currency had doubled again to $2. Although the price of Bitcoin is not stable at a certain price point, it has been showing this pattern of insane growth for some time. At one point in July 2011, the currency stalled and achieved a record-high $31 price point but the market soon realized that it was overvalued compared to the gains made on the ground and it corrected it back to $2.
December 2012 saw a healthy rise to $13 but soon, the price was going to explode. In the four months to April 2013, the price rose to $266. It later corrected itself back to $100 but this astronomical rise in price catapulted it to stardom for the first time and people started debating about a real real-world scenario with Bitcoin.
That’s when I got introduced to the new currency. I had my doubts but the more I read about it, the clearer it became that the currency is the future because there is no one to manipulate it or impose itself on it. Everything had to be done with complete consensus and that is what made it so powerful and liberating.
So 2013 was a breakthrough year for the currency. Large companies began publicly advocating bitcoin adoption, and blockchain became a popular topic for computer science programs. Many thought at the time that Bitcoin had served its purpose and now it would settle down.
But, as the currency became more and more popular, Bitcoin ATMs were installed around the world and other competitors began to flex their muscles in different corners of the market. Ethereum created the first programmable blockchain and Litecoin and Ripple launched themselves as cheaper and faster alternatives to Bitcoin.
The magical figure of $1000 was first breached in January 2017 and has already quadrupled since then till September. This is a truly remarkable achievement for a coin that was worth only 8 cents just seven years ago.
Bitcoin even survived a hard fork on August 1, 2017 and has risen nearly 70% since then, even as the fork Bitcoin Cash has managed to post some success. It’s all because of the coin’s appeal and the stellar blockchain technology behind it.
While conventional economists argue that this is a bubble and the entire crypto world will collapse, this is not the case. There is no such thing as a bubble since it is an observable fact that it actually eats up fiat currency and money trading corporation shares.
The future of Bitcoin is extremely bright and it is never too late to invest in it, both in the short term and long term.