Looking back at the history of Bitcoin development, what major events happened in January every year?
Compilation of the original text: Bai Ze Research Institute
Compilation of the original text: Bai Ze Research Institute
Later this year, Bitcoin will celebrate its 14th "birthday." Bitcoin has come a long way in the past 14 years, with its market capitalization surpassing $1 trillion in 2021.
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2009: The Dawn of Bitcoin
On January 3, 2009, a few months after the release of the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto dug up the Bitcoin creation block and wrote on it: "The Times, January 3, 2009, Finance Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout for Banks," highlighting some of the financial turmoil that inspired him to invent Bitcoin, officially launch the Bitcoin network.
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2010: Real Bitcoin first purchase?
Almost everyone knows the story of Laszlo Hanyecz, who purchased two pizzas for 10,000 BTC in May 2010, largely considered the first "real world" purchase using Bitcoin. However, on January 24, 2010, BitcoinTalk forum user Sabunir posted a thread on the forum titled "Newbie's Test - Anyone Want to Buy a Picture for $1?" Buy a desktop wallpaper with a resolution of 1280x960 and leave his wallet address.
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2011: Bitcoin for Nonprofits
On January 20, 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) made history by becoming the first nonprofit to accept donations in Bitcoin, paving the way for many such organizations to come. By June 2010, they stopped accepting donations before WikiLeaks began accepting bitcoin donations, but they resumed accepting bitcoin again by May 2013.
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2012: Bitcoin is on TV
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2013: Startups Rise
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2014: Games and casinos
By January 2014, things started to heat up as more and more companies started accepting bitcoin as payment. Zynga, the developer behind popular mobile games such as FarmVille, announced plans on Jan. 4 to allow users to make in-game purchases using bitcoin, while the company tested payments using BitPay's infrastructure.
Later that month, on Jan. 21, two Las Vegas casinos and their hotels announced plans to begin accepting bitcoin at some of their operations. Casinos in Las Vegas and Golden Gate became the first casinos to begin accepting bitcoin, long before bitcoin became the global digital currency it is today.
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2015: Rise and fall
Bitcoin had a turbulent start to 2015, posting one of its biggest monthly losses at the time in January 2015, falling 30.9%. Not all was so bad, however, and in fact, Coinbase’s $75 million Series C round in January was considered the largest ever raised by a bitcoin-related company at the time, and it launched its Coinbase exchange later that month.
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2016: Crazy Fork
In January 2016, Bitcoin Classic joined the "fork camp". This is the first fork among many failed Bitcoin forks that is favored by many Bitcoin companies, developers, investors, and miners. While it didn't last long, it inspired many other Bitcoin forks - most of them just for quick cash.
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2017: Overly bullish
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2018: Government boycott
January 2018 saw one of the largest wave of government boycotts against Bitcoin following a massive price increase in late 2017. That month, governments and central banks in China, Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Kosovo, Mozambique, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Slovenia, South Korea, and Tajikistan strongly opposed regarded as currency. More countries followed in the months since.
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2019 to present
Bitcoin has barely been out of the public eye since its sharp price drop in early 2018. Instead, prudent investors began to accumulate slowly, while the price of bitcoin hovered for most of 2018 and 2019. Bitcoin started the second half of 2019 with a surge ahead of the May 2020 halving.
While January during this period was devoid of any major events, Bitcoin did surpass $40,000 for the first time in January 2021, reaching a historic $1 trillion market cap shortly thereafter. In addition, January 2022 is not without historical events: on January 2, the Bitcoin hash rate exceeded 203.5 exahashes per second for the first time, an increase of more than 200 times in the past six years.
According to the "Notice on Further Preventing and Dealing with the Risk of Hype in Virtual Currency Transactions" issued by the central bank and other departments, the content of this article is only for information sharing, and does not promote or endorse any operation and investment behavior. Participate in any illegal financial practice.
risk warning:
According to the "Notice on Further Preventing and Dealing with the Risk of Hype in Virtual Currency Transactions" issued by the central bank and other departments, the content of this article is only for information sharing, and does not promote or endorse any operation and investment behavior. Participate in any illegal financial practice.
