Country to popular believe crypto is not the first to join currency, the first digital currency was created in the 9080s by a man named David Chaum and his project was called Digicash which was founded in 1990.
Following this we have other project like e-gold,hash-cash and B-money. But non of this project succeeded and one of the main reasons is because they where centralized, they can be hacked and shut down at any moment, and in addition these digital cash project where not able to solve the problem of double spending, this is where a person takes the same piece of digital currency and they can spend it in two, three or even more places. So it was not practical it would have never worked.
But then in 2008 following the financial recession, a person or a group by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto released a bitcoin white paper or a guideline to the first decentralized cryptocurrency that solved the double spend problem.
Satoshi nakamoto was not know until this day. But it didn’t really matter who he was. Bitcoin was already decentralized, it was already running.
In the beginning there was no exchanges, no buying, no selling. The way people got bitcoin was by using there regular desktop computers, regular CPU to mine the bitcoin, it was very simple. It wasn’t until may 2010 that the first bitcoin transaction occured for a tangible asset.
At the time in may 2010, a man who bought two pizza for the price of 10,000 bitcoin Which at the time was not very much. This man’s name was Laszlo Henyecz and today people laughed at this man, and the reason they laughed because 10,000 bitcoin as of then April 2020 was worth about seventy one million dollars, so people laughed at this man but the truth is without this important transaction, bitcoin might not have ever reach one dollar. These was actually the transactions that really changed bitcoin, that made it an illegitimate currency.
And following this….people started to take noticed, in 2010 a man by the name of Jed McCaleb he released the MT.GOX bitcoin exchange where people can buy and sell bitcoin and at one point in 2014, MT.GOX counted for 70% of bitcoin transactions but in 2014 MT.GOX was hacked or stolen which 740.000 bitcoin were lost, and was never seen again.
People started realising that bitcoin or digital currency can actually ,be used, people are willing to buy and sell it.
So Ross Ulbricht had the idea of creating the silk road, that’s an underground market where people can buy anything illegal that you can think of.
In 2011 Ross Ulbricht released the silk road. But in 2013, it was short down, after finding out that Ross Ulbricht was the person running it, they shut down the website and forced him to give up and they sized his bitcoin. So with all this going on cryptocurrency but mainly bitcoin started to gain some popularity in the computer science world.
Vitalik Buterin was working at bitcoin magazine and he liked bitcoin,he was a fan but he saw some problems with it.
In 2014, he decided to create and announce his own project called ETHEREUM which was simply digital money and he elevate it and started to build on it.And also program on it.
The legality of bitcoin begins to varies by region. Nine countries have fully banned bitcoin use, while a further fifteen have implicitly banned it. A few governments have used bitcoin in some capacity. El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, although use by merchants remains low. Ukraine has accepted crypto currency donations to fund the resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion. Iran has used bitcoin to bypass sanctions.
Bitcoin has been described as an economic bubble by at least eight recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences while many believed bitcoin rise was in 2017, increasing from $1,000 to $20,000 before crashing back down below $10,000.
Others believe that Bitcoin’s popularity skyrocketed. But thanks to cryptocurrency exchanges, making it easier for people with limited technical knowledge to buy and sell cryptocurrencies.
Whatever the reason may be, one thing is clear, its popularity will continue to grow as more people become aware of what Bitcoin stands for – decentralization and anonymity.