The first block of the Bitcoin blockchain, called the “genesis block”, was validated on January 3, 2009.
While a top Bitcoin blockchain developer has strangely stolen all of his bitcoins, this Tuesday is an important date for the ecosystem. Announced “dead” more than 400 times according to the site 99Bitcoin, the queen of cryptocurrencies is still there and even celebrates her 14th birthday this Tuesday.
Concretely, on January 3, 2009, the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain, called the “genesis block”, was validated. It is in this block that we read, again with reference to the distrust of the traditional financier of the sector, “The Chancellor is about to save the banks for the second time”. These include the headline of the newspaper Times which evoked the rescue of the banks by the British state, in a context of economic crisis. We will have to wait a few days later, on January 12, for a first bitcoin exchange to take place between Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney.
“Without going through a financial institution”
The cryptocurrency, in fact, circulates on the Bitcoin blockchain, the creation and functioning of which was published on October 31, 2008. That day, a certain Satoshi Nakamoto – a person or group of people still unidentified today – published his White paperentitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Payment System” or translated into French “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Payment System”.
Bitcoin is a “fully peer-to-peer electronic money system[that]would allow online payments to be made directly from one individual to another without going through a financial institution,” it reads.
Today, the queen of cryptocurrencies can be seized in different ways, both as a pure object of speculation and as a long-term savings (or store of value) by some individuals, states or companies as an alternative to the traditional finance system.
For now, two states have adopted bitcoin as legal tender: El Salvador and the Central African Republic. At the same time, some companies, such as Telsa or MicroStrategy, have invested part of their money in this cryptocurrency. And the Belgian Member of the Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region Christophe De Beukelaer, whoseBFM Crypto’s interview can be found here, he converted his salary into bitcoin throughout 2022.
Furthermore, even if it remains complicated to “pay” for services in bitcoin as advocated by the bitcoin white paper in 2008, more and more brands are moving in this direction. The system called “Lightning Network” allows in particular to use the bitcoin cryptocurrency at a lower cost and even faster.
This Tuesday at 10am, bitcoin, which is trading below $17,000, lost nearly 70% of its price for a year following multiple crypto crashes and the collapse of FTX. It remains the cryptocurrency with the highest market cap, at $321 billion according to data from Coinmarketcap.