When Bitcoin appeared and why it changed the world of finance
Since the appearance of Bitcoin on the market, its value has increased millions of times. Some lucky ones managed to become early owners of "digital gold" and get rich, while others lost their bitcoins, not believing in the project's success: according to various estimates, by early 2025, between 2.3 – 2.7 million coins have been irretrievably lost.
2008 — the first mention of Bitcoin
The history of the world's first cryptocurrency begins with the registration of the domain bitcoin.org on August 18, 2008. The website address, reserved for Bitcoin, was registered through the anonymous provider Anonimousspeech, making it impossible to identify the user behind it.
An interesting fact: a researcher under the pseudonym Or Weinberger noticed that a day earlier, another domain was registered through the same provider — netcoin.org. In his opinion, Netcoin could have become one of the possible names for the first cryptocurrency, but in the end, the choice was Bitcoin.
The first mention of Bitcoin was recorded on October 31, 2008, when an unknown user under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto began distributing a document with the intriguing title "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System."
In this document, now also widely known as the Bitcoin Whitepaper*, the concept of a decentralized digital currency was presented, allowing peer-to-peer transactions without intermediaries like banks, and capable of existing without external control, such as from government organizations. However, at that time, apart from the document and the registered domain, nothing else was publicly available.
The Bitcoin Whitepaper was published a month after the beginning of the global financial crisis, which resulted from the collapse of the U.S. real estate market, causing trust in traditional financial institutions to plummet. The official starting point of the economic crash is considered September 15, 2008, when the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. This incident was the largest in the history of American banking.
* Whitepaper or WP (literally "white sheet") — a technical document describing the usefulness of a product, technology, or service.
Early 2009 — the launch of the Bitcoin protocol
From a technical point of view, Bitcoin appeared on January 3, 2009 — the date when the first version of the Bitcoin blockchain protocol was launched. On that day, the genesis block was mined, and the first 50 coins* were generated.
* 50 BTC — the mining reward before the first halving.
Gradually, early adopters began joining the Bitcoin network, mining the new digital currency using processors on their home computers.
A curious fact: in the genesis block, enthusiasts discovered an "Easter egg" — the embedded text: "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." The message was encoded into the hash of the first BTC block and is a hidden reference to the headline of The Times newspaper.
Because of this message, some enthusiasts began to believe that Bitcoin was created specifically as a response to the 2008 financial crisis — as a solution to it. It is believed that in this way, Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to highlight the fundamental problem of traditional finance and emphasize Bitcoin's core difference as a decentralized system.
When Bitcoin appeared, the global financial industry was fully centralized. This was manifested in the fact that banks and other financial organizations completely controlled money flows, including the issuance and circulation of fiat currencies. This applied to all sectors: banks, insurance and stock companies, as well as pension funds.
According to experts, this very approach became one of the reasons for the global economic crisis of 2008. For example, errors in the monetary policy of the U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) and new changes in banking legislation led to extremely high inflation and, as a result, financial collapse.
Until the moment when Bitcoin appeared, people used fiat money — in other words, currencies that had not been backed by anything since the abolition of the gold standard in 1971. This led to a gradual decline in purchasing power amid unlimited issuance of fiat currencies: according to some estimates, since the abolition of the gold standard, the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar has fallen by more than 85%.
Bitcoin was the first to introduce a decentralized financial system, allowing all participants (miners) to equally take part in the issuance of digital currency and its circulation without restrictions from a central authority. At the same time, unlike fiat money, Bitcoin is a scarce asset, with issuance programmatically limited to 21,000,000 BTC.
Second half of 2009 — the first official Bitcoin exchange rate
Before appearing on an exchange, Bitcoin had no fixed value, so users could exchange cryptocurrency for fiat or goods only directly — by agreement.
Due to the absence of real trades, Bitcoin could not be classified as property, a commodity, or an asset — BTC was simply a digital unit without value.
But on October 5, 2009, when Bitcoin appeared on an exchange and the first trades were launched, the cryptocurrency's exchange rate was set based on the electricity cost required for mining — 1,309.03 BTC per $1 (or $0.0007 per bitcoin).
Gradually, the small market for digital assets grew into a global industry worth more than $3.8 trillion. And since Bitcoin first appeared on an exchange, its price has risen more than 145 million times.