Bitcoin went from an anti-establishment fad on the internet to a multi-billion dollar market in just 10 years.
It was invented by an anonymous cryptographer going by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakomoto. He, she, or they, wrote bitcoin’s founding white paper a decade ago on Halloween, claiming online to be a Japanese man. But some speculated that was unlikely based on the perfect English, and bitcoin’s software not being labeled in Japanese.
When bitcoin started to gain popularity, Satoshi emailed a fellow bitcoin developer saying they had “moved on to other things.” Satoshi went radio silent on public forums by 2011 and passed the reins to Gavin Andresen, a software engineer, who became the chief developer of the open code that refines the bitcoin protocol.
Sergio Demian Lerner, an Argentine researcher, has estimated that Nakamoto accumulated around one million bitcoins before exiting. That piggy banks is worth over $6.2 billion US at the time of this posting.
Alt coins have followed but Bitcoin still holds the public’s eye when comes to cryptocurrency.
