Bitcoin and Blockchain: A Brief History

blockspill (50)in #steempress • 7 years ago

80% of people reading this post must have heard or know what bitcoin is all about, but if you've never heard of it and you are a complete noob this post is for you.

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need of a central bank or a third party. It was created by Satoshi Nakamoto on the 3rd of January 2009 after he mined the first block on the bitcoin network.

source

Bitcoin was originally co-authored by Hal Finney after Satoshi had contacted other cypherpunks and they turned down his idea, but before Bitcoin was created a cypherpunk by the name David Chaum invented Digi Cash in 1989, another cypherpunk by the name Nick Szabo invented Bit Gold. Although the cypherpunks had this idea conceived but the couldn't really implement it.

Soon after Bitcoin was created and gained popularity Satoshi handed the project over to Gavin Andresen who took Satoshi as his mentor and Satoshi requested that the project be made open-source which means that the project can be modified and improved by anyone, the bitcoin source code is still available on GitHub till date. Bitcoin is denoted by its ticker symbol; BTC or XBT.

source

At some point in time the CIA wanted to speak with Satoshi based on his project after it was being used for numerous criminal activities like on the dark web through a medium called the silk road where anything can be bought or sold including human parts and hit orders, but Satoshi quickly cut off ties with the rest of the bitcoin development team, the last known person to hear from / speak with Satoshi was Gavin Andresen.

Till date, no one knows who is Satoshi Nakamoto is or what he looks like although he claimed to be a Japanese and was born on 5 April 1975, there is a list of people suspected to be bitcoin's creator;

• Hal Finney: Bitcoin's Co-author

• Gavin Andresen: A programmer who took Satoshi as his mentor

• Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto: A Japanese American man who denied being satoshi

• Craig Wright: A man who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto and has made rash promises and threats about Bitcoin and has also embezzled huge sums of bitcoin. He has sued many times as a scammer and is still under some court cases.

And also a few notable figures who are not mentioned above.

The technology which bitcoin is built upon is called Blockchain Technology which is believed to be impossible to be hacked due to its main feature Decentralization with means that bitcoin has no central base and can not be shut down by any government or person neither is it controlled by anyone so far as there is someone running a node of the network or a master node or even an active miner the blockchain will still be up and running.

source

Some years after Bitcoin was created Hal Finney became ill with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) aka Lou Gehrig's disease which gradually destroys the neurons in the body which makes movement impossible, which later ends up in death. The CIA came to interview him about Bitcoin's creator when he was asked if he was Satoshi he smiled and blinked which meant NO. At the point of his death, Hal Finney requested that his body be stored cryogenically till a cure of the disease will be found or till the day the real Satoshi will stand up.

New bitcoins are created by a process called mining which simply means using a computer's processing power to solve a difficult math problem, once the problem is solved the miner is rewarded with bitcoin. In bitcoin's early days, it was only worth meager fractions of a penny as of the time this post was made 18,000,000 bitcoin out of 21,000,000 have been mined from the blockchain.

As of this post was published a bitcoin was worth 9000 United States Dollars (USD).

Bitcoin halving occurs every 210,000 blocks.

Since one block is added to the Bitcoin blockchain roughly every 10 minutes, each halving happens every 4 years.

Halving simply means when the mining reward per block will be split into half, for example, the 12.5 BTC reward of 2016-2019 will become 6.25 BTC per block in May 2020.

The more bitcoin mined the harder it is to mine that is simply known as mining difficulty.