#BTC $BTC
Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency, established in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym name, and was used as a currency starting in 2009.
The domain name bitcoin.org was registered on August 18, 2008. On October 31, 2008, a white paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" was posted to a cryptography mailing list.
At first, Nakamoto's paper wasn't peer reviewed and was initially ignored by academics who argued that it could not work. Nonetheless, on January 3, 2009, Nakomoto mined the first block of chain, known as the genesis block. Nine days later, the first Bitcoin transaction was made, Hall Finney received 10 Bitcoins from Nakomoto. On May 22, 2010, programmer Lazlo Hanyecz made the first known commercial transaction using Bitcoin, he bought two Papa John's pizzas for 10,000 BTC. This was latter celebrated 🥳 as "Bitcoin Pizza Day".
Nakamoto himself had mined roughly a one million bitcoins as Blockchain analyst estimated before he disappeared in 2010. He gave Gavin Andresen the network alert key and control of the code repository.
According to River Financial, there were over 82 million bitcoin users as of June 2023, which is around 1% of the world's population!