The big events that had a profound impact on the blockchain a few years ago are rarely mentioned now

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特邀专栏作者

2019-07-19 15:00 (UTC+8)

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In view of the past, we know the future, and the history of the blockchain remembers those years and events.

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In view of the past, we know the future, and the history of the blockchain remembers those years and events.

Editor's Note: This article comes fromvernacular blockchainEditor's Note: This article comes from

(ID: hellobtc), author: Tingfeng, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.Virtual currencyIn 2019, many

Virtual currency

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year 2013

1. Bull Market vs Countrybitcoinearly 2013,

The price is $13.30. In the following months, due to technical problems and the impact of national regulations, the price of encrypted assets fluctuated violently, which also verified the high volatility of encrypted assets.bitcoin forkbitcoin fork

, the price of bitcoin plummeted 23%. The upgrade error resulted in two chains recording different versions of transaction history at the same time within 6 hours. The community noticed this right away and downgraded all versions to version 0.7 before the issue was resolved. Within hours, Mt. Gox stopped deposits, causing Bitcoin to crash.

Bitcoin crash in 2013

A few hours later, the bitcoin price climbed back to an all-time high of $48. This is the first test of Bitcoin's decentralized governance, as developers need to convince the majority of nodes that have upgraded to version 0.8 to downgrade to version 0.7 in order to maintain the uniqueness of the transaction chain.

image descriptionOriginal message from developer Peter WuilleMeanwhile, on March 19, the US implemented its first regulatory guidelines. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) takes action against the sale of mining

Classified as Money Services Businesses (MSBs), in effect acknowledging that mining Bitcoin is a financial activity subject to capital gains tax.

From then on, U.S. miners exchanging bitcoin for dollars will need to register and comply with money laundering regulations. This rule does not apply to miners who buy goods with bitcoin, only traders. FinCEN published a full guide on “decentralized virtual currencies,” though they have since removed it from their website.

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Bitcoin price experienced one of the worst flash crashes in April, as BitInstant and Mt.Gox couldn't handle the transaction volume and service bandwidth.

Bitcoin price dropped 83% in less than three days, from $259 to $45.

The 3 Big Price Crashes of 2013

A month later, on May 15, U.S. authorities stepped in and seized Mt. Gox's accounts for not registering with FinCEN currency remittance guidelines.

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14 Cryptocurrency Assets Listed on Internet Archive

This is the oldest screenshot obtained from Coinmarketcap.com using the Internet Archive Wayback machine. The date is May 2013, which is weird — only 14 cryptoassets were listed at the time.Another milestone occurred on June 23, 2013, when the US Drug Enforcement Administration's DEA listed 11.02 bitcoins as seized assets by the US Department of Justice. This is the first time a state agency has seized bitcoin, adding to its legitimacy as an asset of value.In July 2013, the cryptocurrency space was hit hard. Seattle-based software engineer JR Willet launched

: Mastercoin, later renamed Omni. This method of issuing tokens will be utilized by many projects in the coming years.

In the second half of the year, the development of the blockchain took a big step forward - the advent of Ethereum.

secondary title3. Blockchain 2.0, namely Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin is a programmer and author for Bitcoin Magazine

, in which he defined Ethereum and demonstrated his vision for building a decentralized application platform in a white paper.

First of all, V God tried to reach a consensus in the Bitcoin community to develop a scripting language that could allow application development, but after many discussions, it still ended in failure, so he proposed Ethereum. Here is an excerpt from the white paper:

Trying to solve the hard problems of Bitcoin-based smart assets, smart contracts, and decentralized autonomous enterprises is the reason for our initial interest in Cryptocurrency 2.0 technology.However, we realized in our research that while the Bitcoin protocol is adequate for money, basic multi-signature escrow, and some simple versions of smart contracts, there are some fundamental limitations that make it useful beyond a certain Certain ranges of things are not feasible. Its functional scope is very limited.In October, the FBI arrested

Silk Road DarknetAt current prices, that equated to $1.2 billion in revenue and more than $80 million in commissions. At about the same time,。

OpenCoin rebrands to Ripple Labs

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4. China’s Bitcoin Ban

By the end of November, the price reached an all-time high of $1163, followed by a lengthy bear market that lasted until 2015, with prices down 87%.

The crash was largely attributed to the fact that on December 5, 2013, the People's Bank of China banned the use of Bitcoin by Chinese financial institutions. Baidu stopped accepting most bitcoin-related services, and the price of bitcoin plummeted again.

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5. Buddhist coins

On December 18, one of the most interesting stalks in the encryption community was born.

Subsequently, dozens of forum users borrowed this meaning and used it to generate many memes. Later, some people redefine the term as an acronym (HODL = Hold for Dear Life Buddha Department holding currency), reaffirming the use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a store of value.

Year 2014

Just five years after its inception, Bitcoin was on the upswing in 2014, amidst scandals, state bans, and the launch of new projects that are now mainstream crypto currency.

secondary title1. Trading platform bankruptcyIn 2014, the infamous

Trading Platform Mentougou

(Mt. Gox) started to crash.

In late February, a PowerPoint presentation from the company was leaked in which the company admitted to losing 744,408 bitcoins (approximately $350 million).

In April 2014, Mentougou officially announced that they were filing for bankruptcy in Japan after their hopes of using outside investment to make up for losses fell through. Nobuaki Kobayashi, the bankruptcy trustee of the trading platform, is often blamed by the public for allegedly selling Bitcoin to pay off Mt. Gox’s debts, which led to the cryptocurrency’s 2018 bear market.

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In March 2014, another scandal occurred. Neo & Bee, a Cyprus-based bitcoin bricks-and-mortar bank, has suspended all BTC stock trading due to unusual activity. Back in 2013, after the Cyprus credit crisis, the Neo&Bee project was hyped and successfully listed in September 2013.

After opening their first physical branch, CEO Danny Brewster was flown to the UK following a Cyprus suit. Former employees have taken to Reddit to denounce the state of the company.

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2. China’s Third Bitcoin Ban

"All websites are not allowed to participate in or report on the summit, and cannot speculate on Bitcoin. All reports on Bitcoin must comply with the regulations of financial regulators. Please implement the above requirements immediately."

Earlier, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) announced that all accounts related to bitcoin transactions would be closed. The CEOs of China's top five bitcoin trading platforms also declined to attend the Global Bitcoin Summit.

secondary title3. Era of Ethereum。

In January 2014, at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami,

Ethereum is bornGavin WoodDuring the meeting, a group of people who rented a house in Miami were Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson and Anthony Di Iorio, a Torontonian who provided funding for the project. He invited his friend Joseph Lubin, who in turn invited journalist Morgen Peck to testify on the project.

By April 2014,

Published the Ethereum Yellow Paper.

The later well-known Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is based on the technical specifications of the Yellow Paper and implemented through seven programming languages (C ++, Go, Python, Java, JavaScript, Haskell, Rust).

By June 2014, six months after ethereum was announced, the founders met again at a house in Zug, Switzerland. V God announced that the project will be carried out in a non-profit manner, which is what we know as the Ethereum Foundation. But by then Hoskinson had left the project team.

Also in June, Vitalik won the 2014 Thiel Fellows (Thiel Student Program). PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s $100,000 investment boosted Vitalik’s profile, which was dominating the cryptocurrency headlines ahead of the ethereum token sale.

Funding for Ethereum development came from a 42-day token sale in July-August 2014.

Participants can exchange bitcoins for ether. The transaction net income was 31,591 bitcoins (approximately US$18.4 million at the time), and a total of 60,102,216 ethers were sold. The money was used to pay legal fees, the development of the platform, and to fund further development under the ETH DEV non-profit organization.

Ethereum quickly gathered more and more publicity and community around its development, forums and Reddit subreddits, and although there were doubts about Ethereum's security and scalability from the beginning, So far, Ethereum is still developing a blockchain protocol with stronger computing power.

In November 2014, ETH DEV hosted the 5-day DEVCON-0 workshop in Berlin, bringing together Ethereum developers from around the world.

V god spoke at the DevCon-0 conference.

Many of the topics at DEVCON-0 had a huge impact on various initiatives to make Ethereum more reliable, secure, and scalable. Ethereum's programming language Solidity, a high-level programming language created specifically for implementing smart contracts, was released the next day.

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4. Overview of major projects

There were many other projects launched in 2014, here is a summary of the main ones:

Next Generation McCaleb Release

Likewise, in July 2014, Mt. Gox and Ripple founder Jed McCaleb released the Stellar open source protocol with Joyce Kim. Stellar debuted on July 31, 2014, with $3 million in seed funding from payments company Stripe.

The Arrival of Stablecoins

Another new project for virtual currency is Realcoin, a precursor to Tether, which was launched in July 2014 by Brock Pierce, Reeve Collins, and Craig Sellars Announcement, claiming to be the first cryptocurrency backed by US dollars.

image descriptionUSDT predecessorOn October 6th, the first batch to use the Omni underlying protocol,