It’s 31 October 2019 and today marks exactly 11 years since the release of Bitcoin’s whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto. On this day in 2008 the first cryptocurrency was conceived and it created a monumental shift in the way we perceive the future of money and provided a revolutionary new direction for resisting censorship from the corrupt central banking system that has been ruling over our lives for over a century.
Indeed, censorship resistant ownership of one’s capital is a giant leap for anyone who’s ever been a victim of unfair seizure of their funds by the authorities and there are many an example of such abuses of power throughout the years across the world and even though most people today see Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies mainly as means to become rich quick, the true essence of this new asset class lies in the fact that it provided a real opportunity to combat the dangers of having one’s capital taken away from them.
I don’t want to undermine the fact that Bitcoin did create hundreds of millionaires throughout the past decade and continues to do so, nor do I try to oppose the concept of shifting power and capital from the centralised banking system back to the common folk. This was all very beneficial to everyone who was bright enough to enter this space in the early years and especially to those risk-takers who believed in the power of the digital currency from the early days when it was in its infancy and the rest of world was completely dismissive of it (myself included in those sceptics), so let’s take a moment and reflect on what we have achieved in the past 11 years.
Here are just a handful of examples of what Bitcoin managed to bring to the world and why this (still hugely volatile) digital currency is so important to the world and everyone who is involved in its network.
- Blockchain – possibly the biggest and most widely recognised invention that Bitcoin brought to the world is the creation of a decentralised, independently shared and publicly accessible and verifiable record of data that is immutable and resistant to censorship or control from any one entity.
There have been many nay-sayers and sceptics of Bitcoin but even the hardest opposition to crypto, such as the central banking system, admits that Blockchain technology is the future and recognise it as one of the greatest innovations of our time.
- The first Bitcoin transaction in the real world was for 2 pizzas on May 22 2009 which became known as Bitcoin Pizza Day. The guy who wanted to be known as the first person to buy something with Bitcoin paid 10 000 bitcoins for the pizzas which today comes to about 93 million US dollars.
- Bitcoin has created more millionaires than any other asset in the past decade. The exact number is not recorded but it’s a fact that there are even a handful of billionaires created by investments in Bitcoin.
- Over the past decade we managed to mine more than 85% of the total bitcoin supply which is capped at 21 million coins. Today the circulating supply amounts to 18,022,262 coins produced by 601,794 blocks according to coinmarketcap.
- Bitcoin’s network consists of thousands of computers worldwide is more powerful than the world’s top 5 supercomputers combined. It has never been hacked and is fully decentralised.
- It took 4 years for bitcoin to go from $0 to $1000 and less than 1 year to jump from $1000 to $20 000 (back in 2017). Since then the price has corrected and we experienced a downtrend in 2018 but things picked up again and the $20k price tag is once again within reach in the foreseeable future.
- Bitcoin’s produce is halved every 4 years and although we have already mined the majority of it, it will take us another 100+ years until we mine the last satoshi.
- In its decade of existence bitcoin has outperformed every other stock or asset in the world in terms of price appreciation, surpassing even the value of Gold and Silver and bringing in much higher Return of Investment to its hodlers.
- The term HODL was born by a simple mistake in a drunken post on a Bitcoin forum and it became a worldwide acronym used by everyone, even mainstream media.
- The smallest spendable denomination of Bitcoin is called a “satoshi” in reference to its creator and this month the term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. The term “bitcoin” was already added to the dictionary back in 2014 and was defined as: “a digital currency in which transactions can be performed without the need for a central bank.”
- Bitcoin gave birth to a whole new industry called cryptocurrencies and today there are more than 2000 of them, many of which are trying to add new use cases and go beyond the monetary use of bitcoin.
- There are currently 9255 public nodes running on the Bitcoin network. (at the time of writing, but this number is changing daily.)
- The price of Bitcoin is by far the biggest catalyst in its popularity amongst the retail investor and to date it’s price appreciation comes to a whopping +292,635.11% since its conception.
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🏆Exchanges I use for trading crypto:
►Binance
►Kucoin
►Bittrex
►Bitfinex
►HitBtc
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Where I buy crypto:
►BitPanda (Europe)
►Cex (Global)
►Coinmama (Global)
►Changelly (good for instant coins swaps)(Global)
►Payeer (Europe, Asia, alternative to paypal)
►Bitfinex
►Coinbase (USA, EU, Africa) Get $10 worth of Bitcoin on your first $100 crypto purchase with this link: http://bit.do/coinbase_join
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Where I store my crypto
- Ledger Nano – the best hardware wallet (offline storage)
- Trezor – also one of the best wallets out there.
- Exodus – desktop wallet
- Coinomi – mobile phone wallet with instant coin swap feature
- Crypto.com – mobile wallet and exchange
