Happy Bitcoin Birthday — Satoshi’s Whitepaper Turns 11 Years Old

Oct 31, 2019
15:10
2 min reading

Choise.com team

Today is Bitcoin’s 11^th birthday as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of the world’s most renowned digital asset, released the project’s white paper on the 31^st of October 2008. Titled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’ the project game to light shortly, almost coincidentally, after the global economic crisis of 2008.

After publishing the project’s white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto sent an email concerning Bitcoin to a number of cypherpunks at the time, stating that he has been developing an electronic cash system that is entirely peer-to-peer (P2P). After the public release, Satoshi launched Bitcoin in January 2009 by creating and mining the genesis block, which represents the first processed block of information in a blockchain network.

Now, 11 years later, Bitcoin represents one of the most trustworthy systems for exchanging money and information. In December 2017, the digital asset reached its highest value at almost $20,000, after which it plunged deeper and deeper before reaching a price bottom at $3,200 on December 15^th2018.

Progressively rising, Bitcoin showed to the world that the cryptocurrency sector is set for a full recovery as it is expected that the project will soon reach its old all-time-high in a new bull run. The next year will be an important hallmark for the cryptocurrency, as Bitcoin’s halving event will reduce block rewards from 12.5 BTC per block to 6.25 BTC per block.

The halving event will result in a reduced number of Bitcoins entering the circulating supply, which then leads to a mining correction. Following the reaction from miners, the price will soon reflect the new situation as it starts to rise. Based on historical data, every previous halving event led to a bull run in which the entire cryptocurrency market experienced significant gains.

While a lot has happened in the sector for the previous 11 years, Bitcoin still has a long way to go until it reaches global and mainstream adoption. At the time, a number of promising projects lack the scalability needed to reach significant levels of adoption, which results in a stalemate both in terms of price and development. However, second-layer solutions such as the Lightning Network promise to solve Bitcoin’s scalability issue, which would improve the utility of the digital asset.

New year, new opportunities

Besides Bitcoin, the altcoin segment that was born during the last bull run contains more projects than ever. The leading altcoin Ethereum plans to roll out a major update in 2020, Ethereum 2.0.

The new version was on Vitalik Buterin’s roadmap for years and the functionalities that it may bring has resulted in optimism amongst the community for the project’s future.

Despite the small bump on the road caused by several corrections after Bitcoin reached $14,000 in July, the sector retains a bullish tone as we are only months away from the start of a potential bull market.

According to some analysts, Bitcoin is set to reach a price of $100,000 while some speculate that the project may even reach a million dollars by the end of the bull run. Nevertheless, 2020 will be an exciting year for the entire sector.