Bitcoin Wiki - User contributions [en]

Category:History

2011-07-18T09:26:09Z

Ribuck: On 2 June 2011 the exchange rate first touched $10 at MtGox

* August 18, 2008
** Domain name "bitcoin.org" registered.
* October 31, 2008
** [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/12588/ Bitcoin design paper] published
* November 09, 2008
** Bitcoin project registered at SourceForge.net
* January 3, 2009
** Genesis block established at 18:15:05 GMT
* January 11, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.1 released and announced on the [http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10152.html cryptography mailing list]
* December 16, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.2 released
* December 30, 2009
** First difficulty increase at 06:11:04 GMT
* February 6, 2010
** [[Bitcoin Market]] established
* May 22, 2010
** laszlo first to buy pizza with Bitcoins [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195 agreeing] upon paying 10,000 BTC for ~$25 worth of pizza courtesy of jercos
* July 7, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 released
* July 11, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 release [http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/Bitcoin-Releases-Version-03 mentioned on slashdot], bringing a large influx of new bitcoin users.
* July 12, 2010
** Beginning of a 10x increase in exchange value over a 5 day period, from about $0.008/BTC to $0.08/BTC
* July 17, 2010
** [[MtGox]] established
* July 18, 2010
** ArtForz generated his first block after establishing his personal OpenCL GPU hash farm
* August 15, 2010
** Bug in the bitcoin code allows a bad transaction into block 74638. Users quickly adopt fixed code and the "good" block chain overtook the bad one at a block height of 74691, 53 blocks later ([[Incidents#Value_overflow]]).
* September 14, 2010
** jgarzik [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg12921#msg12921 offered] 10,000 BTC (valued at ~$600-650) to puddinpop to open source their windows-based CUDA client
* September 18, 2010
** puddinpop [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg13135#msg13135 released] source to their windows-based CUDA client under MIT license
* September 29, 2010
** kermit [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1306.0 discovered] a microtransactions exploit which precipitated the Bitcoin v0.3.13 release
* October 01, 2010
** First public OpenCL miner released
* October 04, 2010
** Original Bitcoin History wiki page (this page) established (ooh so meta) on Bitcoin.org's wiki.
* October 07, 2010
** Exchange rate started climbing up from $0.06/BTC after several flat months.
* October 28, 2010
** First bitcoin short sale transaction initiated, with a loan of 100 BTC by nanotube to [[User:Kiba|kiba]], facilitated by the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* November 6, 2010
** The [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1672 Bitcoin economy passed US $1 million]. The MtGox price touched USD $0.50/BTC.
* December 7, 2010
** Bitcoind was compiled for the Nokia N900 mobile computer by doublec. The following day, ribuck sent him 0.42 BTC in the first portable-to-portable Bitcoin transaction.
* December 9, 2010
** The generation difficulty passed 10,000.
** First bitcoin call option contract sold, from nanotube to [[User:Sgornick|sgornick]], via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* December 16, 2010
** [http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ Bitcoin Pooled Mining], operated by slush, found its first block
* January 2, 2011
** [[Tonal BitCoin]] units standardized.
* January 8, 2011
** [[History of Bitcoin]] page (this page) created after replicating from original Bitcoin History page on Bitcoin.org.
** Bitcoin Pooled Mining reached a total of 10,000 Mhash/s
* January 27, 2011
** Largest numeric value ever traded for bitcoins thus far occurred on this date. Three currency bills from Zimbabwe, known as Zimdollars, were traded on [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] at the rate of 4 BTC for each of the one-hundred trillion dollar ($100,000,000,000,000) Zimbabwe notes<ref>Serial numbers for Zimdollars sold: AA1669317, AA1669318 and AA1669319</ref>
* January 28, 2011
** Block 105000 was generated. This means that 5.25 million bitcoins have been generated, which is just over one-quarter of the eventual total of nearly 21 million.
* February 9, 2011
** Decimal Bitcoin reached parity with the US dollar, touching $1 per BTC at [[MtGox]].
* February 10, 2011
** Bitcoin.org website struggles to handle [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3444.0 traffic] resulting from mentions on Slashdot<ref>[http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/Online-Only-Currency-BitCoin-Reaches-Dollar-Parity Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity]</ref>, Hacker News and Twitter following the news that parity had been reached.
* February 14, 2011
** A vehicle was, for the first time, offered in exchange for a certain number of bitcoins<ref>[http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3485.0 Car for Sale - Australia]</ref>.
* March 6, 2011
** Total Bitcoin network computation speed for a short time [http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png reached an all-time high of almost 900Ghash/sec], dropping to 500Ghash/sec soon after. Some speculate that this was due to some supercomputer or bot-net that joined the network ([http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html mystery miner]).
* March 18, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches a 6-week low point at almost $0.70/BTC, after what appeared to be a short burst of, possibly automated, BTC sales at progressively lower prices. BTC price had been declining since the February 9 high.
* March 25, 2011
** Difficulty decreased nearly 10%. A decrease has only occurred once before, and this decrease of nearly 10% was the largest.
* March 27, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the British Pound Sterling BTC/GBP, [[Britcoin]], opens.
* March 31, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from Brazilian Reals, [[Bitcoin Brazil]], opens.
* April 5, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the Polish złoty, [[BitMarket.eu]], opens.
* April 12, 2011
** First bitcoin put option contract sold via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* April 16, 2011
** TIME does [http://techland.time.com/2011/04/16/online-cash-bitcoin-could-challenge-governments/ an article on Bitcoin].
* April 23, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the Euro (EUR) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the British Sterling Pound (GBP) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** Value of the Bitcoin money stock at current exchange rate passes $10 million USD threshold.
* April 27, 2011
** [[VirWoX]] opens first market to trade bitcoins against a virtual currency on BTC/SL (Second Life Lindens) exchange.
* April 28, 2011
** Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/120630 120,630] is first to be mined using split allocation of the generation reward.
* April 30, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 100,000.
* June 2, 2011
** The exchange rate at [[MtGox]] touched 10 USD per BTC.
* June 3, 2011
** [[Tonal Bitcoin]] reached parity with the US cent, touching 1¢ per TBC at [[Bitcoin Market]].
* June 10, 2011
** The [[MtGox]] exchange rate peaked above 31 USD, before dropping to below 10 USD four days later, in its largest percentage price retreat to date.
* June 13, 2011
** Forum user allinvain claimed to have had [http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16457.0 25,000 BTC stolen] from his Bitcoin wallet (approx. USD equivalent $375,000).
* June 19, 2011
** The MtGox database was compromised and the user table was leaked, containing details of 60,000 usernames, email addresses and password hashes, some of which were based on a highly vulnerable hashing algorithm.
* June 19, 2011
** Someone was able to access an admin account at MtGox and issue sell orders for hundreds of thousands of fake bitcoins, forcing the MtGox price down from $17.51 per bitcoin to $0.01. MtGox announced that these trades would be reversed. Trading was halted at MtGox for 7 days (and also briefly at TradeHill and Britcoin while their security was reviewed).
* June 19, 2011
** Some of the users on the leaked MtGox database had used the same username at MyBitcoin and had their passwords hacked. About 600 of them had their balance [http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=22221.msg279396#msg279396 stolen from their MyBitcoin accounts]. One user lost over 2000 BTC.
* June 20, 2011
** The EFF announced that it was no longer accepting Bitcoin donations due to legal uncertainties.
* June 24, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 1,000,000 with Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/133056 133056].

==References==
<references />

Help:FAQ

2011-07-05T11:41:04Z

Ribuck: /* But if no more coins are generated, what happens when Bitcoins are lost? Won't that be a problem? */

Here you will find answers to the most commonly asked questions.

== General ==
=== What are bitcoins? ===
Bitcoins are the unit of currency of the Bitcoin system. A commonly used shorthand for this is “BTC” to refer to a price or amount (eg: “100 BTC”).
A Bitcoin isn't tangible. It is just a number associated with a [[Address|Bitcoin Address]]. See also an [[Introduction|easy intro]] to bitcoin.

=== How can I get Bitcoins? ===

There are five ways to get Bitcoins:

* There are several services where you can [[buying bitcoins|trade them]] for “real” money.
* Accept Bitcoins as payment for goods or services.
* Find a local trader on [http://tradebitcoin.com tradebitcoin] (or somewhere else) and trade with him in cash.
* Create a new [[block]] (currently yields 50 Bitcoins).
* Participate in a [[Pooled mining|mining pool]].

=== Can I buy Bitcoins with Paypal? ===

While it's possible to find an individual who wishes to sell Bitcoin to you via Paypal, (perhaps via [http://www.bitcoin-otc.com/ #bitcoin-otc] ) most major exchanges do not allow funding through Paypal. This is due to repeated cases where someone pays for Bitcoins with Paypal, receives their Bitcoins, and then fraudulently complains to Paypal that they never received their goods. Paypal too often sides with the fraudulent buyer in this case, and so exchangers no longer allow this method of funding.

=== Where can I find a forum full of Bitcoin users?===

There are many forums ou there that are based on Bitcoins although the off-site active bitcoin forum would be http://bitforums.net. The other on-site forum is located on http://bitcoin.org

Buying Bitcoins from individuals with this method is still possible, but requires mutual trust. In this case, Bitcoin seller beware.

=== How are new Bitcoins created? ===

[[File:total_bitcoins_over_time_graph.png|thumb|Number of bitcoins over time, assuming a perfect 10-minute interval.]]
New coins are generated by a network node each time it finds the solution to a certain mathematical problem (i.e. creates a new [[block]]), which is difficult to perform and can demonstrate a [[proof of work]]. The reward for solving a block is [[controlled inflation|automatically adjusted]] so that in the first 4 years of the Bitcoin network, 10,500,000 BTC will be created. The amount is halved each 4 years, so it will be 5,250,000 over years 4-8, 2,625,000 over years 8-12 and so on. Thus the total number of coins will approach 21,000,000 BTC over time.

In addition, built into the network is a system that attempts to allocate new coins in blocks about every 10 minutes, on average, somewhere on the network. As the number of people who attempt to generate these new coins changes, the difficulty of creating new coins changes. This happens in a manner that is agreed upon in advance by the network as a whole, based upon the time taken to generate the previous 2016 blocks. The difficulty is therefore related to the average computing resources devoted to generate these new coins over the time it took to create these previous blocks. The likelihood of somebody "discovering" one of these blocks is based on the calculation speed of the system that they are using compared to the aggregate calculation speed of all the other systems generating blocks on the network.

=== What's the current total number of Bitcoins in existence? ===

[http://blockexplorer.com/q/totalbc Current count]

The number of blocks times the coin value of a block is the number of coins in existence. The coin value of a block is 50 BTC for each of the first 210,000 blocks, 25 BTC for the next 210,000 blocks, then 12.5 BTC, 6.25 BTC and so on.

=== How divisible are Bitcoins? ===

Technically, a Bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimals using existing data structures, so 0.00000001 BTC is the smallest amount currently possible. Discussions about and ideas for ways to provide for even smaller quantities of Bitcoins may be created in the future if the need for them ever arises.

=== What do I call the various denominations of Bitcoins? ===

There is a lot of discussion about the naming of these fractions of Bitcoins. The leading candidates are:

* 1 BTC = 1 Bitcoin
* 0.01 BTC = 1 cBTC = 1 Centi-Bitcoin (also referred to as Bitcent)
* 0.001 BTC = 1 mBTC = 1 Milli-Bitcoin (also referred to as mbit (pronounced em-bit) or millibit)
* 0.000 001 BTC = 1 μBTC = 1 Micro-Bitcoin (also referred to as ubit (pronounced yu-bit) or microbit)

The above follows the accepted international SI units for thousandths, millionths and billionths. There are many arguments against the special case of 0.01 BTC since it is unlikely to represent anything meaningful as the Bitcoin economy grows (it certainly won't be the equivalent of 0.01 USD, GBP or EUR). Equally, the inclusion of existing national currency denominations such as "cent", "nickel", "dime", "pence", "pound", "kopek" and so on are to be discouraged. This is a worldwide currency.

One exception is the "satoshi" which is smallest denomination currently possible

* 0.000 000 01 BTC = 1 Satoshi (pronounced sa-toh-shee)

which is so named in honour of Satoshi Nakamoto the pseudonym of the inventor of Bitcoin.

For an overview of all defined units of Bitcoin (including less common and niche units), see [[Units]].

Further discussion on this topic can be found on the forums here:

* [http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=14438.msg195287#msg195287 We need names]
* [http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8282.0 What to call 0.001 BTC]

=== How does the halving work when the number gets really small? ===

The reward will go from 0.00000001 BTC to 0. Then no more coins will likely be created.

The calculation is done as a right bitwise shift of a 64-bit signed integer, which means it is divided by 2 and rounded down. The integer is equal to the value in BTC * 100,000,000. This is how all Bitcoin balances/values are stored internally.

Keep in mind that using current rules this will take nearly 100 years before it becomes an issue and Bitcoins may change considerably before that happens.

=== How long will it take to generate all the coins? ===

The last block that will generate coins will be block #6,929,999. This should be generated around year 2140. Then the total number of coins in circulation will remain static at 20,999,999.9769 BTC.

Even if the allowed precision is expanded from the current 8 decimals, the total BTC in circulation will always be slightly below 21 million (assuming everything else stays the same). For example, with 16 decimals of precision, the end total would be 20999999.999999999496 BTC.

=== If no more coins are going to be generated, will more blocks be created? ===

Absolutely! Even before the creation of coins ends, the use of [[transaction fee|transaction fees]] will likely make creating new blocks more valuable from the fees than the new coins being created. When coin generation ends, what will sustain the ability to use bitcoins will be these fees entirely. There will be blocks generated after block #6,929,999, assuming that people are still using Bitcoins at that time.

=== But if no more coins are generated, what happens when Bitcoins are lost? Won't that be a problem? ===

Because of the law of supply and demand, when fewer bitcoins are available the ones that are left will be in higher demand, and therefore will have a higher value. So, as Bitcoins are lost, the remaining bitcoins will increase in value to compensate. As the value of a bitcoin increases, the number of bitcoins required to purchase an item '''de'''creases. This is a [[Deflationary spiral|deflationary economic model]]. As the average transaction size reduces, transactions will probably be denominated in sub-units of a bitcoin such as millibitcoins ("Millies") or microbitcoins ("Mikes").

The Bitcoin protocol uses a base unit of one hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin ("a Satoshi"), but unused bits are available in the protocol fields that could be used to denote even smaller subdivisions.

=== If every transaction is broadcast via the network, does BitCoin scale? ===
The Bitcoin protocol allows lightweight clients that can use Bitcoin without downloading the entire transaction history. As traffic grows and this becomes more critical, implementations of the concept will be developed. Full network nodes will at some point become a more specialized service.

With some modifications to the software, full BitCoin nodes could easily keep up with both VISA and MasterCard combined, using only fairly modest hardware (a couple of racks of machines using todays hardware). It's worth noting that the MasterCard network is structured somewhat like BitCoin itself - as a peer to peer broadcast network.

Learn more about [[Scalability]].

=== Why do I have to wait 10 minutes before I can spend money I received? ===

10 minutes is the average time taken to find a block. It can be significantly more or less time than that depending on luck; 10 minutes is simply the average case.

Blocks (shown as "confirmations" in the GUI) are how the BitCoin achieves consensus on who owns what. Once a block is found everyone agrees that you now own those coins, so you can spend them again. Until then it's possible that some network nodes believe otherwise, if somebody is attempting to defraud the system by reversing a transaction. The more confirmations a transaction has, the less risk there is of a reversal. Only 6 blocks or 1 hour is enough to make reversal computationally impractical. This is dramatically better than credit cards which can see chargebacks occur up to three months after the original transaction!

Why ten minutes specifically? It is a tradeoff chosen by Satoshi between propagation time of new blocks in large networks and the amount of work wasted due to chain splits. If that made no sense to you, don't worry. Reading [http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf the technical paper] should make things clearer.

=== Do you have to wait 10 minutes in order to buy or sell things with BitCoin? ===

No, it's reasonable to sell things without waiting for a confirmation as long as the transaction is not of high value.

When people ask this question they are usually thinking about applications like supermarkets or snack machines, as discussed in [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=423.msg3819#msg3819 this thread from July 2010]. Zero confirmation transactions still show up in the GUI, but you cannot spend them. You can however reason about the risk involved in assuming you ''will'' be able to spend them in future. In general, selling things that are fairly cheap (like snacks, digital downloads etc) for zero confirmations will not pose a problem if you are running a well connected node.

=== Why does my Bitcoin address keep changing? ===

Whenever the address listed in "Your address" receives a transaction, Bitcoin replaces it with a new address. This is meant to encourage you to use a new address for every transaction, which enhances [[anonymity]]. All of your old addresses are still usable: you can see them in ''Settings -> Your Receiving Addresses''.

==Economy==
=== Where does the value of Bitcoin stem from? What backs up Bitcoin? ===
Bitcoins have value because they are accepted as payment by many. See the [[Trade|list of Bitcoin-accepting sites]].

When we say that a currency is backed up by gold, we mean that there's a promise in place that you can exchange the currency for gold. In a sense, you could say that Bitcoin is "backed up" by the price tags of merchants – a price tag is a promise to exchange goods for a specified amount of currency.

It's a common misconception that Bitcoins gain their value from the cost of electricity required to generate them. Cost doesn't equal value – hiring 1,000 men to shovel a big hole in the ground may be costly, but not valuable. Also, even though scarcity is a critical requirement for a useful currency, it alone doesn't make anything valuable. For example, your fingerprints are scarce, but that doesn't mean they have any exchange value.

=== What if someone bought up all the existing Bitcoins? ===
What if somebody bought up all the gold in the world? Well, by attempting to buy it all, the buyer would just drive the prices up until he runs out of money.

Not all Bitcoins are for sale. Just as with gold, no one can buy a Bitcoin that isn't available for sale.

=== Won't Bitcoin's deflationary tendencies cause a deflationary spiral? ===
See the article [[Deflationary spiral]].

=== Doesn't Bitcoin unfairly benefit early adopters? ===
Early adopters have a large number of bitcoins now because they took a risk and invested resources in an unproven technology. By so doing, they have helped Bitcoin become what it is now and what it will be in the future (hopefully, a ubiquitous decentralized digital currency). It is only fair they will reap the benefits of their successful investment.

In any case, any bitcoin generated will probably change hands dozens of time as a medium of exchange, so the profit made from the initial distribution will be insignificant compared to the total commerce enabled by Bitcoin.

=== Is Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme? ===
In a Ponzi Scheme, the founders persuade investors that they’ll profit. Bitcoin does not make such a guarantee. There is no central entity, just individuals building an economy.

A ponzi scheme is a zero sum game. Early adopters can only profit at the expense of late adopters. Bitcoin has possible win-win outcomes. Early adopters profit from the rise in value. Late adopters profit from the usefulness of a stable and widely accepted p2p currency.

The fact that early adopters benefit more doesn't alone make anything a ponzi scheme. Apple stocks aren't ponzi even though the early investors got rich.

=== Is Bitcoin a bubble? ===
Yes, in the same way as the euro and dollar are. They only have value in exchange and no value in use. If everyone suddenly stopped accepting your dollars, euros or bitcoins, the "bubble" would burst and their value would drop to zero. But that is unlikely to happen: even in Somalia, where the government collapsed 20 years ago, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somali_shilling Somali shillings] are still accepted as payment.

==Networking==
=== Do I need to configure my firewall to run bitcoin? ===

Bitcoin will connect to other nodes, usually on tcp port 8333. You will need to allow outgoing TCP connections to port 8333 if you want to allow your bitcoin client to connect to many nodes. Bitcoin will also try to connect to IRC (tcp port 6667) to meet other nodes to connect to.

If you want to restrict your firewall rules to a few ips and/or don't want to allow IRC connection, you can find stable nodes in the [[Fallback Nodes|fallback nodes list]]. If your provider blocks the common IRC ports, note that lfnet also listens on port 7777. Connecting to this alternate port currently requires either recompiling Bitcoin, or changing routing rules. For example, on Linux you can evade a port 6667 block by doing something like this:

echo 173.246.103.92 irc.lfnet.org >> /etc/hosts
iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dest 173.246.103.92 --dport 6667 -j DNAT --to-destination :7777 -m comment --comment "bitcoind irc connection"

=== How does the peer finding mechanism work? ===
Bitcoin finds peers primarily by connecting to an IRC server (channel #bitcoin on irc.lfnet.org). If a connection to the IRC server cannot be established (like when connecting through TOR), an in-built node list will be used and the nodes will be queried for more node addresses.

==Mining==
===What is mining?===
Mining is the process of spending computation power to find valid blocks and thus create new Bitcoins.

Technically speaking, mining is the calculation of a [[hash]] of the a block header, which includes among other things a reference to the previous block, a hash of a set of transactions and a [[nonce]]. If the hash value is found to be less than the current [[target]] (which is inversely proportional to the [[difficulty]]), a new block is formed and the miner gets 50 newly generated Bitcoins. If the hash is not less than the current target, a new nonce is tried, and a new hash is calculated. This is done millions of times per second by each miner.

===Why was the "Generate coin" option of the client software removed?===

In the early days of Bitcoin, it was easy for anyone to find new blocks using standard CPUs. As more and more people started mining, the [[difficulty]] of finding new blocks has greatly increased to the point where the average time for a CPU to find a single block can be many years. The only cost-effective method of mining is using a high-end graphics card with special software (see also [[Why a GPU mines faster than a CPU]]) and/or joining a [[Bitcoin Pool|mining pool]]. Since solo CPU mining is essentially useless, it was removed from the GUI of the Bitcoin software.

===Is mining used for some useful computation?===
The computations done when mining are internal to Bitcoin and not related to any other distributed computing projects. They serve the purpose of securing the Bitcoin network, which is useful.

===Is it not a waste of energy?===
Spending energy on creating a free monetary system is hardly a waste. Also, services necessary for the operation of currently widespread monetary systems, such as banks and credit card companies, also spend energy, arguably more than Bitcoin would.

===Why don't we use calculations that are also useful for some other purpose?===
To provide security for the Bitcoin network, the calculations involved need to have some very specific features. These features are incompatible with leveraging the computation for other purposes.

===How does the proof-of-work system help secure Bitcoin?===
To give a general idea of the mining process, imagine this setup:

payload = <some data related to things happening on the Bitcoin network>
nonce = 1
hash = [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA2 SHA2]( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA2 SHA2]( payload + nonce ) )

The work performed by a miner consists of repeatedly increasing "nonce" until
the hash function yields a value, that has the rare property of being below a certain
target threshold. (In other words: The hash "starts with a certain number of zeroes",
if you display it in the fixed-length representation, that is typically used.)

As can be seen, the mining process doesn't compute anything special. It merely
tries to find a number (also referred to as nonce) which - in combination with the payload -
results in a hash with special properties.

The advantage of using such a mechanism consists of the fact, that it is very easy to check a result: Given
the payload and a specific nonce, only a single call of the hashing function
is needed to verify that the hash has the required properties. Since there is no
known way to find these hashes other than brute force, this can be used as a "proof of work"
that someone invested a lot of computing power to find the correct nonce for this payload.

This feature is then used in the Bitcoin network to secure various aspects. An attacker
that wants to introduce malicious payload data into the network, will need to do the
required proof of work before it will be accepted. And as long as honest miners have more
computing power, they can always outpace an attacker.

Also see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA2 SHA2] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system Proof-of-work system] on Wikipedia.

==Help==
===I'd like to learn more. Where can I get help?===

* Read the [[Introduction|introduction to bitcoin]]
* See the videos, podcasts, and blog posts from the [[Press]]
* Read and post on the [[Bitcoin:Community_portal#Bitcoin_Community_Forums|forums]]
* Chat on one of the [[Bitcoin:Community_portal#IRC_Chat|Bitcoin IRC]] channels
* Listen to [http://omegataupodcast.net/2011/03/59-bitcoin-a-digital-decentralized-currency/ this podcast], which goes into the details of how bitcoin works

==See Also==

* [[Man page]]
* [[Introduction]]

[[de:FAQ]]
[[zh-cn:FAQ]]
[[fr:FAQ]]

[[Category:Technical]]
[[Category:Vocabulary]]

Talk:Bitcoinlinked

2011-06-28T14:48:43Z

Ribuck: /* Delete request */

== Delete request ==

The article is praising something that is not even mentioned. The author should add a link or something and clearly name what it is in an introduction. --[[User:Giszmo|Giszmo]] 13:51, 28 June 2011 (GMT)

It's just advertising. Delete. If there is related content that should be on this wiki, someone not associated with the service can put it up. [[User:Ribuck|Ribuck]] 14:48, 28 June 2011 (GMT)

Talk:Bitcoinlinked

2011-06-28T14:48:32Z

Ribuck: /* Delete request */

Talk:Bitcoinlined

2011-06-28T14:47:05Z

Ribuck: /* request for deletion */

== request for deletion ==

Bitcoinlined most likely was an accident and meant to be [[Bitcoinlinked]]. Imho both are candidates for deletion. [[User:Giszmo|Giszmo]] 13:36, 28 June 2011 (GMT)

Yes, delete promptly. [[User:Ribuck|Ribuck]] 14:47, 28 June 2011 (GMT)

Category:History

2011-06-28T14:42:16Z

Ribuck: MtGox closure was for 7 days

* August 18, 2008
** Domain name "bitcoin.org" registered.
* October 31, 2008
** [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/12588/ Bitcoin design paper] published
* November 09, 2008
** Bitcoin project registered at SourceForge.net
* January 3, 2009
** Genesis block established at 18:15:05 GMT
* January 11, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.1 released and announced on the [http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10152.html cryptography mailing list]
* December 16, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.2 released
* December 30, 2009
** First difficulty increase at 06:11:04 GMT
* February 6, 2010
** [[Bitcoin Market]] established
* May 22, 2010
** laszlo first to buy pizza with Bitcoins [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195 agreeing] upon paying 10,000 BTC for ~$25 worth of pizza courtesy of jercos
* July 7, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 released
* July 11, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 release [http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/Bitcoin-Releases-Version-03 mentioned on slashdot], bringing a large influx of new bitcoin users.
* July 12, 2010
** Beginning of a 10x increase in exchange value over a 5 day period, from about $0.008/BTC to $0.08/BTC
* July 17, 2010
** [[MtGox]] established
* July 18, 2010
** ArtForz generated his first block after establishing his personal OpenCL GPU hash farm
* August 15, 2010
** Bug in the bitcoin code allows a bad transaction into block 74638. Users quickly adopt fixed code and the "good" block chain overtook the bad one at a block height of 74691, 53 blocks later ([[Incidents#Value_overflow]]).
* September 14, 2010
** jgarzik [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg12921#msg12921 offered] 10,000 BTC (valued at ~$600-650) to puddinpop to open source their windows-based CUDA client
* September 18, 2010
** puddinpop [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg13135#msg13135 released] source to their windows-based CUDA client under MIT license
* September 29, 2010
** kermit [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1306.0 discovered] a microtransactions exploit which precipitated the Bitcoin v0.3.13 release
* October 01, 2010
** First public OpenCL miner released
* October 04, 2010
** Original Bitcoin History wiki page (this page) established (ooh so meta) on Bitcoin.org's wiki.
* October 07, 2010
** Exchange rate started climbing up from $0.06/BTC after several flat months.
* October 28, 2010
** First bitcoin short sale transaction initiated, with a loan of 100 BTC by nanotube to [[User:Kiba|kiba]], facilitated by the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* November 6, 2010
** The [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1672 Bitcoin economy passed US $1 million]. The MtGox price touched USD $0.50/BTC.
* December 7, 2010
** Bitcoind was compiled for the Nokia N900 mobile computer by doublec. The following day, ribuck sent him 0.42 BTC in the first portable-to-portable Bitcoin transaction.
* December 9, 2010
** The generation difficulty passed 10,000.
** First bitcoin call option contract sold, from nanotube to [[User:Sgornick|sgornick]], via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* December 16, 2010
** [http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ Bitcoin Pooled Mining], operated by slush, found its first block
* January 2, 2011
** [[Tonal BitCoin]] units standardized.
* January 8, 2011
** [[History of Bitcoin]] page (this page) created after replicating from original Bitcoin History page on Bitcoin.org.
** Bitcoin Pooled Mining reached a total of 10,000 Mhash/s
* January 27, 2011
** Largest numeric value ever traded for bitcoins thus far occurred on this date. Three currency bills from Zimbabwe, known as Zimdollars, were traded on [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] at the rate of 4 BTC for each of the one-hundred trillion dollar ($100,000,000,000,000) Zimbabwe notes<ref>Serial numbers for Zimdollars sold: AA1669317, AA1669318 and AA1669319</ref>
* January 28, 2011
** Block 105000 was generated. This means that 5.25 million bitcoins have been generated, which is just over one-quarter of the eventual total of nearly 21 million.
* February 9, 2011
** Bitcoin reached parity with the US dollar, touching $1 per BTC at [[MtGox]].
* February 10, 2011
** Bitcoin.org website struggles to handle [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3444.0 traffic] resulting from mentions on Slashdot<ref>[http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/Online-Only-Currency-BitCoin-Reaches-Dollar-Parity Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity]</ref>, Hacker News and Twitter following the news that parity had been reached.
* February 14, 2011
** A vehicle was, for the first time, offered in exchange for a certain number of bitcoins<ref>[http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3485.0 Car for Sale - Australia]</ref>.
* March 6, 2011
** Total Bitcoin network computation speed for a short time [http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png reached an all-time high of almost 900Ghash/sec], dropping to 500Ghash/sec soon after. Some speculate that this was due to some supercomputer or bot-net that joined the network ([http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html mystery miner]).
* March 18, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches a 6-week low point at almost $0.70/BTC, after what appeared to be a short burst of, possibly automated, BTC sales at progressively lower prices. BTC price had been declining since the February 9 high.
* March 25, 2011
** Difficulty decreased nearly 10%. A decrease has only occurred once before, and this decrease of nearly 10% was the largest.
* March 27, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the British Pound Sterling BTC/GBP, [[Britcoin]], opens.
* March 31, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from Brazilian Reals, [[Bitcoin Brazil]], opens.
* April 5, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the Polish złoty, [[BitMarket.eu]], opens.
* April 12, 2011
** First bitcoin put option contract sold via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* April 16, 2011
** TIME does [http://techland.time.com/2011/04/16/online-cash-bitcoin-could-challenge-governments/ an article on Bitcoin].
* April 23, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the Euro (EUR) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the British Sterling Pound (GBP) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** Value of the Bitcoin money stock at current exchange rate passes $10 million USD threshold.
* April 27, 2011
** [[VirWoX]] opens first market to trade bitcoins against a virtual currency on BTC/SL (Second Life Lindens) exchange.
* April 28, 2011
** Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/120630 120,630] is first to be mined using split allocation of the generation reward.
* April 30, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 100,000.
* May 10, 2011
** The exchange rate at [[MtGox]] touched 6 USD per BTC.
* June 10, 2011
** The [[MtGox]] exchange rate peaked above 31 USD, before dropping to below 10 USD four days later, in its largest percentage price retreat to date.
* June 13, 2011
** Forum user allinvain claimed to have had [http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16457.0 25,000 BTC stolen] from his Bitcoin wallet (approx. USD equivalent $375,000).
* June 19, 2011
** The MtGox database was compromised and the user table was leaked, containing details of 60,000 usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords
* June 19, 2011
** Someone was able to access hundreds of thousands of bitcoins at MtGox and sold them off, forcing the MtGox price down from $17.51 per bitcoin to $0.01. MtGox announced that these trades would be reversed. Trading was halted at MtGox for 7 days (and also briefly at TradeHill and Britcoin while their security was reviewed).
* June 19, 2011
** Some of the users on the leaked MtGox database had used the same username at MyBitcoin and had their passwords hacked. About 600 of them had their balance [http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=22221.msg279396#msg279396 stolen from their MyBitcoin accounts]. One user lost over 2000 BTC.
* June 20, 2011
** The EFF announced that it was no longer accepting Bitcoin donations due to legal uncertainties.
* June 24, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 1,000,000 with Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/133056 133056].

==References==
<references />

Category:History

2011-06-28T14:40:55Z

Ribuck: Theft from MyBitcoin accounts using leaked MtGox database

* August 18, 2008
** Domain name "bitcoin.org" registered.
* October 31, 2008
** [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/12588/ Bitcoin design paper] published
* November 09, 2008
** Bitcoin project registered at SourceForge.net
* January 3, 2009
** Genesis block established at 18:15:05 GMT
* January 11, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.1 released and announced on the [http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10152.html cryptography mailing list]
* December 16, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.2 released
* December 30, 2009
** First difficulty increase at 06:11:04 GMT
* February 6, 2010
** [[Bitcoin Market]] established
* May 22, 2010
** laszlo first to buy pizza with Bitcoins [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195 agreeing] upon paying 10,000 BTC for ~$25 worth of pizza courtesy of jercos
* July 7, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 released
* July 11, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 release [http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/Bitcoin-Releases-Version-03 mentioned on slashdot], bringing a large influx of new bitcoin users.
* July 12, 2010
** Beginning of a 10x increase in exchange value over a 5 day period, from about $0.008/BTC to $0.08/BTC
* July 17, 2010
** [[MtGox]] established
* July 18, 2010
** ArtForz generated his first block after establishing his personal OpenCL GPU hash farm
* August 15, 2010
** Bug in the bitcoin code allows a bad transaction into block 74638. Users quickly adopt fixed code and the "good" block chain overtook the bad one at a block height of 74691, 53 blocks later ([[Incidents#Value_overflow]]).
* September 14, 2010
** jgarzik [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg12921#msg12921 offered] 10,000 BTC (valued at ~$600-650) to puddinpop to open source their windows-based CUDA client
* September 18, 2010
** puddinpop [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg13135#msg13135 released] source to their windows-based CUDA client under MIT license
* September 29, 2010
** kermit [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1306.0 discovered] a microtransactions exploit which precipitated the Bitcoin v0.3.13 release
* October 01, 2010
** First public OpenCL miner released
* October 04, 2010
** Original Bitcoin History wiki page (this page) established (ooh so meta) on Bitcoin.org's wiki.
* October 07, 2010
** Exchange rate started climbing up from $0.06/BTC after several flat months.
* October 28, 2010
** First bitcoin short sale transaction initiated, with a loan of 100 BTC by nanotube to [[User:Kiba|kiba]], facilitated by the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* November 6, 2010
** The [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1672 Bitcoin economy passed US $1 million]. The MtGox price touched USD $0.50/BTC.
* December 7, 2010
** Bitcoind was compiled for the Nokia N900 mobile computer by doublec. The following day, ribuck sent him 0.42 BTC in the first portable-to-portable Bitcoin transaction.
* December 9, 2010
** The generation difficulty passed 10,000.
** First bitcoin call option contract sold, from nanotube to [[User:Sgornick|sgornick]], via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* December 16, 2010
** [http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ Bitcoin Pooled Mining], operated by slush, found its first block
* January 2, 2011
** [[Tonal BitCoin]] units standardized.
* January 8, 2011
** [[History of Bitcoin]] page (this page) created after replicating from original Bitcoin History page on Bitcoin.org.
** Bitcoin Pooled Mining reached a total of 10,000 Mhash/s
* January 27, 2011
** Largest numeric value ever traded for bitcoins thus far occurred on this date. Three currency bills from Zimbabwe, known as Zimdollars, were traded on [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] at the rate of 4 BTC for each of the one-hundred trillion dollar ($100,000,000,000,000) Zimbabwe notes<ref>Serial numbers for Zimdollars sold: AA1669317, AA1669318 and AA1669319</ref>
* January 28, 2011
** Block 105000 was generated. This means that 5.25 million bitcoins have been generated, which is just over one-quarter of the eventual total of nearly 21 million.
* February 9, 2011
** Bitcoin reached parity with the US dollar, touching $1 per BTC at [[MtGox]].
* February 10, 2011
** Bitcoin.org website struggles to handle [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3444.0 traffic] resulting from mentions on Slashdot<ref>[http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/Online-Only-Currency-BitCoin-Reaches-Dollar-Parity Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity]</ref>, Hacker News and Twitter following the news that parity had been reached.
* February 14, 2011
** A vehicle was, for the first time, offered in exchange for a certain number of bitcoins<ref>[http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3485.0 Car for Sale - Australia]</ref>.
* March 6, 2011
** Total Bitcoin network computation speed for a short time [http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png reached an all-time high of almost 900Ghash/sec], dropping to 500Ghash/sec soon after. Some speculate that this was due to some supercomputer or bot-net that joined the network ([http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html mystery miner]).
* March 18, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches a 6-week low point at almost $0.70/BTC, after what appeared to be a short burst of, possibly automated, BTC sales at progressively lower prices. BTC price had been declining since the February 9 high.
* March 25, 2011
** Difficulty decreased nearly 10%. A decrease has only occurred once before, and this decrease of nearly 10% was the largest.
* March 27, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the British Pound Sterling BTC/GBP, [[Britcoin]], opens.
* March 31, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from Brazilian Reals, [[Bitcoin Brazil]], opens.
* April 5, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the Polish złoty, [[BitMarket.eu]], opens.
* April 12, 2011
** First bitcoin put option contract sold via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* April 16, 2011
** TIME does [http://techland.time.com/2011/04/16/online-cash-bitcoin-could-challenge-governments/ an article on Bitcoin].
* April 23, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the Euro (EUR) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the British Sterling Pound (GBP) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** Value of the Bitcoin money stock at current exchange rate passes $10 million USD threshold.
* April 27, 2011
** [[VirWoX]] opens first market to trade bitcoins against a virtual currency on BTC/SL (Second Life Lindens) exchange.
* April 28, 2011
** Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/120630 120,630] is first to be mined using split allocation of the generation reward.
* April 30, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 100,000.
* May 10, 2011
** The exchange rate at [[MtGox]] touched 6 USD per BTC.
* June 10, 2011
** The [[MtGox]] exchange rate peaked above 31 USD, before dropping to below 10 USD four days later, in its largest percentage price retreat to date.
* June 13, 2011
** Forum user allinvain claimed to have had [http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16457.0 25,000 BTC stolen] from his Bitcoin wallet (approx. USD equivalent $375,000).
* June 19, 2011
** The MtGox database was compromised and the user table was leaked, containing details of 60,000 usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords
* June 19, 2011
** Someone was able to access hundreds of thousands of bitcoins at MtGox and sold them off, forcing the MtGox price down from $17.51 per bitcoin to $0.01. MtGox announced that these trades would be reversed. Trading was halted at MtGox (and also briefly at TradeHill and Britcoin while their security was reviewed).
* June 19, 2011
** Some of the users on the leaked MtGox database had used the same username at MyBitcoin and had their passwords hacked. About 600 of them had their balance [http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=22221.msg279396#msg279396 stolen from their MyBitcoin accounts]. One user lost over 2000 BTC.
* June 20, 2011
** The EFF announced that it was no longer accepting Bitcoin donations due to legal uncertainties.
* June 24, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 1,000,000 with Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/133056 133056].

==References==
<references />

Category:History

2011-06-25T12:09:51Z

Ribuck: MtGox price before selloff was $17.51 not $17.50

* August 18, 2008
** Domain name "bitcoin.org" registered.
* October 31, 2008
** [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/12588/ Bitcoin design paper] published
* November 09, 2008
** Bitcoin project registered at SourceForge.net
* January 3, 2009
** Genesis block established at 18:15:05 GMT
* January 11, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.1 released and announced on the [http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10152.html cryptography mailing list]
* December 16, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.2 released
* December 30, 2009
** First difficulty increase at 06:11:04 GMT
* February 6, 2010
** [[Bitcoin Market]] established
* May 22, 2010
** laszlo first to buy pizza with Bitcoins [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195 agreeing] upon paying 10,000 BTC for ~$25 worth of pizza courtesy of jercos
* July 7, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 released
* July 11, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 release [http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/Bitcoin-Releases-Version-03 mentioned on slashdot], bringing a large influx of new bitcoin users.
* July 12, 2010
** Beginning of a 10x increase in exchange value over a 5 day period, from about $0.008/BTC to $0.08/BTC
* July 17, 2010
** [[MtGox]] established
* July 18, 2010
** ArtForz generated his first block after establishing his personal OpenCL GPU hash farm
* August 15, 2010
** Bug in the bitcoin code allows a bad transaction into block 74638. Users quickly adopt fixed code and the "good" block chain overtook the bad one at a block height of 74691, 53 blocks later ([[Incidents#Value_overflow]]).
* September 14, 2010
** jgarzik [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg12921#msg12921 offered] 10,000 BTC (valued at ~$600-650) to puddinpop to open source their windows-based CUDA client
* September 18, 2010
** puddinpop [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg13135#msg13135 released] source to their windows-based CUDA client under MIT license
* September 29, 2010
** kermit [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1306.0 discovered] a microtransactions exploit which precipitated the Bitcoin v0.3.13 release
* October 01, 2010
** First public OpenCL miner released
* October 04, 2010
** Original Bitcoin History wiki page (this page) established (ooh so meta) on Bitcoin.org's wiki.
* October 07, 2010
** Exchange rate started climbing up from $0.06/BTC after several flat months.
* October 28, 2010
** First bitcoin short sale transaction initiated, with a loan of 100 BTC by nanotube to [[User:Kiba|kiba]], facilitated by the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* November 6, 2010
** The [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1672 Bitcoin economy passed US $1 million]. The MtGox price touched USD $0.50/BTC.
* December 7, 2010
** Bitcoind was compiled for the Nokia N900 mobile computer by doublec. The following day, ribuck sent him 0.42 BTC in the first portable-to-portable Bitcoin transaction.
* December 9, 2010
** The generation difficulty passed 10,000.
** First bitcoin call option contract sold, from nanotube to [[User:Sgornick|sgornick]], via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* December 16, 2010
** [http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ Bitcoin Pooled Mining], operated by slush, found its first block
* January 2, 2011
** [[Tonal BitCoin]] units standardized.
* January 8, 2011
** [[History of Bitcoin]] page (this page) created after replicating from original Bitcoin History page on Bitcoin.org.
** Bitcoin Pooled Mining reached a total of 10,000 Mhash/s
* January 27, 2011
** Largest numeric value ever traded for bitcoins thus far occurred on this date. Three currency bills from Zimbabwe, known as Zimdollars, were traded on [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] at the rate of 4 BTC for each of the one-hundred trillion dollar ($100,000,000,000,000) Zimbabwe notes<ref>Serial numbers for Zimdollars sold: AA1669317, AA1669318 and AA1669319</ref>
* January 28, 2011
** Block 105000 was generated. This means that 5.25 million bitcoins have been generated, which is just over one-quarter of the eventual total of nearly 21 million.
* February 9, 2011
** Bitcoin reached parity with the US dollar, touching $1 per BTC at [[MtGox]].
* February 10, 2011
** Bitcoin.org website struggles to handle [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3444.0 traffic] resulting from mentions on Slashdot<ref>[http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/Online-Only-Currency-BitCoin-Reaches-Dollar-Parity Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity]</ref>, Hacker News and Twitter following the news that parity had been reached.
* February 14, 2011
** A vehicle was, for the first time, offered in exchange for a certain number of bitcoins<ref>[http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3485.0 Car for Sale - Australia]</ref>.
* March 6, 2011
** Total Bitcoin network computation speed for a short time [http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png reached an all-time high of almost 900Ghash/sec], dropping to 500Ghash/sec soon after. Some speculate that this was due to some supercomputer or bot-net that joined the network ([http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html mystery miner]).
* March 18, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches a 6-week low point at almost $0.70/BTC, after what appeared to be a short burst of, possibly automated, BTC sales at progressively lower prices. BTC price had been declining since the February 9 high.
* March 25, 2011
** Difficulty decreased nearly 10%. A decrease has only occurred once before, and this decrease of nearly 10% was the largest.
* March 27, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the British Pound Sterling BTC/GBP, [[Britcoin]], opens.
* March 31, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from Brazilian Reals, [[Bitcoin Brazil]], opens.
* April 5, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the Polish złoty, [[BitMarket.eu]], opens.
* April 12, 2011
** First bitcoin put option contract sold via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* April 16, 2011
** TIME does [http://techland.time.com/2011/04/16/online-cash-bitcoin-could-challenge-governments/ an article on Bitcoin].
* April 23, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the Euro (EUR) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the British Sterling Pound (GBP) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** Value of the Bitcoin money stock at current exchange rate passes $10 million USD threshold.
* April 27, 2011
** [[VirWoX]] opens first market to trade bitcoins against a virtual currency on BTC/SL (Second Life Lindens) exchange.
* April 28, 2011
** Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/120630 120,630] is first to be mined using split allocation of the generation reward.
* April 30, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 100,000.
* May 10, 2011
** The exchange rate at [[MtGox]] touched 6 USD per BTC.
* June 10, 2011
** The [[MtGox]] exchange rate peaked above 31 USD, before dropping to below 10 USD four days later, in its largest percentage price retreat to date.
* June 13, 2011
** Forum user allinvain claimed to have had [http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16457.0 25,000 BTC stolen] (approx. USD equivalent $375,000)
* June 19, 2011
** The MtGox database was compromised and the user table was leaked, containing details of 60,000 usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords
* June 19, 2011
** Someone was able to access hundreds of thousands of bitcoins at MtGox and sold them off, forcing the MtGox price down from $17.51 per bitcoin to $0.01. MtGox announced that these trades would be reversed. Trading was halted at MtGox (and also briefly at TradeHill and Britcoin while their security was reviewed).
* June 20, 2011
** The EFF announced that it was no longer accepting Bitcoin donations due to legal uncertainties.
* June 24, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 1,000,000 with Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/133056 133056].

==References==
<references />

Category:History

2011-06-25T12:07:54Z

Ribuck: EFF stops accepting BTC, MtGox crash, MtGox database leak, BCM doesn't trade TBC

* August 18, 2008
** Domain name "bitcoin.org" registered.
* October 31, 2008
** [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/12588/ Bitcoin design paper] published
* November 09, 2008
** Bitcoin project registered at SourceForge.net
* January 3, 2009
** Genesis block established at 18:15:05 GMT
* January 11, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.1 released and announced on the [http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10152.html cryptography mailing list]
* December 16, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.2 released
* December 30, 2009
** First difficulty increase at 06:11:04 GMT
* February 6, 2010
** [[Bitcoin Market]] established
* May 22, 2010
** laszlo first to buy pizza with Bitcoins [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195 agreeing] upon paying 10,000 BTC for ~$25 worth of pizza courtesy of jercos
* July 7, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 released
* July 11, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 release [http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/Bitcoin-Releases-Version-03 mentioned on slashdot], bringing a large influx of new bitcoin users.
* July 12, 2010
** Beginning of a 10x increase in exchange value over a 5 day period, from about $0.008/BTC to $0.08/BTC
* July 17, 2010
** [[MtGox]] established
* July 18, 2010
** ArtForz generated his first block after establishing his personal OpenCL GPU hash farm
* August 15, 2010
** Bug in the bitcoin code allows a bad transaction into block 74638. Users quickly adopt fixed code and the "good" block chain overtook the bad one at a block height of 74691, 53 blocks later ([[Incidents#Value_overflow]]).
* September 14, 2010
** jgarzik [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg12921#msg12921 offered] 10,000 BTC (valued at ~$600-650) to puddinpop to open source their windows-based CUDA client
* September 18, 2010
** puddinpop [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg13135#msg13135 released] source to their windows-based CUDA client under MIT license
* September 29, 2010
** kermit [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1306.0 discovered] a microtransactions exploit which precipitated the Bitcoin v0.3.13 release
* October 01, 2010
** First public OpenCL miner released
* October 04, 2010
** Original Bitcoin History wiki page (this page) established (ooh so meta) on Bitcoin.org's wiki.
* October 07, 2010
** Exchange rate started climbing up from $0.06/BTC after several flat months.
* October 28, 2010
** First bitcoin short sale transaction initiated, with a loan of 100 BTC by nanotube to [[User:Kiba|kiba]], facilitated by the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* November 6, 2010
** The [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1672 Bitcoin economy passed US $1 million]. The MtGox price touched USD $0.50/BTC.
* December 7, 2010
** Bitcoind was compiled for the Nokia N900 mobile computer by doublec. The following day, ribuck sent him 0.42 BTC in the first portable-to-portable Bitcoin transaction.
* December 9, 2010
** The generation difficulty passed 10,000.
** First bitcoin call option contract sold, from nanotube to [[User:Sgornick|sgornick]], via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* December 16, 2010
** [http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ Bitcoin Pooled Mining], operated by slush, found its first block
* January 2, 2011
** [[Tonal BitCoin]] units standardized.
* January 8, 2011
** [[History of Bitcoin]] page (this page) created after replicating from original Bitcoin History page on Bitcoin.org.
** Bitcoin Pooled Mining reached a total of 10,000 Mhash/s
* January 27, 2011
** Largest numeric value ever traded for bitcoins thus far occurred on this date. Three currency bills from Zimbabwe, known as Zimdollars, were traded on [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] at the rate of 4 BTC for each of the one-hundred trillion dollar ($100,000,000,000,000) Zimbabwe notes<ref>Serial numbers for Zimdollars sold: AA1669317, AA1669318 and AA1669319</ref>
* January 28, 2011
** Block 105000 was generated. This means that 5.25 million bitcoins have been generated, which is just over one-quarter of the eventual total of nearly 21 million.
* February 9, 2011
** Bitcoin reached parity with the US dollar, touching $1 per BTC at [[MtGox]].
* February 10, 2011
** Bitcoin.org website struggles to handle [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3444.0 traffic] resulting from mentions on Slashdot<ref>[http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/Online-Only-Currency-BitCoin-Reaches-Dollar-Parity Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity]</ref>, Hacker News and Twitter following the news that parity had been reached.
* February 14, 2011
** A vehicle was, for the first time, offered in exchange for a certain number of bitcoins<ref>[http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3485.0 Car for Sale - Australia]</ref>.
* March 6, 2011
** Total Bitcoin network computation speed for a short time [http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png reached an all-time high of almost 900Ghash/sec], dropping to 500Ghash/sec soon after. Some speculate that this was due to some supercomputer or bot-net that joined the network ([http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html mystery miner]).
* March 18, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches a 6-week low point at almost $0.70/BTC, after what appeared to be a short burst of, possibly automated, BTC sales at progressively lower prices. BTC price had been declining since the February 9 high.
* March 25, 2011
** Difficulty decreased nearly 10%. A decrease has only occurred once before, and this decrease of nearly 10% was the largest.
* March 27, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the British Pound Sterling BTC/GBP, [[Britcoin]], opens.
* March 31, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from Brazilian Reals, [[Bitcoin Brazil]], opens.
* April 5, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the Polish złoty, [[BitMarket.eu]], opens.
* April 12, 2011
** First bitcoin put option contract sold via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* April 16, 2011
** TIME does [http://techland.time.com/2011/04/16/online-cash-bitcoin-could-challenge-governments/ an article on Bitcoin].
* April 23, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the Euro (EUR) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the British Sterling Pound (GBP) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** Value of the Bitcoin money stock at current exchange rate passes $10 million USD threshold.
* April 27, 2011
** [[VirWoX]] opens first market to trade bitcoins against a virtual currency on BTC/SL (Second Life Lindens) exchange.
* April 28, 2011
** Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/120630 120,630] is first to be mined using split allocation of the generation reward.
* April 30, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 100,000.
* May 10, 2011
** The exchange rate at [[MtGox]] touched 6 USD per BTC.
* June 10, 2011
** The [[MtGox]] exchange rate peaked above 31 USD, before dropping to below 10 USD four days later, in its largest percentage price retreat to date.
* June 13, 2011
** Forum user allinvain claimed to have had [http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16457.0 25,000 BTC stolen] (approx. USD equivalent $375,000)
* June 19, 2011
** The MtGox database was compromised and the user table was leaked, containing details of 60,000 usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords
* June 19, 2011
** Someone was able to access hundreds of thousands of bitcoins at MtGox and sold them off, forcing the MtGox price down from $17.50 per bitcoin to $0.01. MtGox announced that these trades would be reversed. Trading was halted at MtGox (and also briefly at TradeHill and Britcoin while their security was reviewed).
* June 20, 2011
** The EFF announced that it was no longer accepting Bitcoin donations due to legal uncertainties.
* June 24, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 1,000,000 with Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/133056 133056].

==References==
<references />

Category:History

2011-06-24T21:47:14Z

Ribuck: No such thing as "Decimal Bitcoin"

* August 18, 2008
** Domain name "bitcoin.org" registered.
* October 31, 2008
** [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/12588/ Bitcoin design paper] published
* November 09, 2008
** Bitcoin project registered at SourceForge.net
* January 3, 2009
** Genesis block established at 18:15:05 GMT
* January 11, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.1 released and announced on the [http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10152.html cryptography mailing list]
* December 16, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.2 released
* December 30, 2009
** First difficulty increase at 06:11:04 GMT
* February 6, 2010
** [[Bitcoin Market]] established
* May 22, 2010
** laszlo first to buy pizza with Bitcoins [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195 agreeing] upon paying 10,000 BTC for ~$25 worth of pizza courtesy of jercos
* July 7, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 released
* July 11, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 release [http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/Bitcoin-Releases-Version-03 mentioned on slashdot], bringing a large influx of new bitcoin users.
* July 12, 2010
** Beginning of a 10x increase in exchange value over a 5 day period, from about $0.008/BTC to $0.08/BTC
* July 17, 2010
** [[MtGox]] established
* July 18, 2010
** ArtForz generated his first block after establishing his personal OpenCL GPU hash farm
* August 15, 2010
** Bug in the bitcoin code allows a bad transaction into block 74638. Users quickly adopt fixed code and the "good" block chain overtook the bad one at a block height of 74691, 53 blocks later ([[Incidents#Value_overflow]]).
* September 14, 2010
** jgarzik [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg12921#msg12921 offered] 10,000 BTC (valued at ~$600-650) to puddinpop to open source their windows-based CUDA client
* September 18, 2010
** puddinpop [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg13135#msg13135 released] source to their windows-based CUDA client under MIT license
* September 29, 2010
** kermit [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1306.0 discovered] a microtransactions exploit which precipitated the Bitcoin v0.3.13 release
* October 01, 2010
** First public OpenCL miner released
* October 04, 2010
** Original Bitcoin History wiki page (this page) established (ooh so meta) on Bitcoin.org's wiki.
* October 07, 2010
** Exchange rate started climbing up from $0.06/BTC after several flat months.
* October 28, 2010
** First bitcoin short sale transaction initiated, with a loan of 100 BTC by nanotube to [[User:Kiba|kiba]], facilitated by the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* November 6, 2010
** The [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1672 Bitcoin economy passed US $1 million]. The MtGox price touched USD $0.50/BTC.
* December 7, 2010
** Bitcoind was compiled for the Nokia N900 mobile computer by doublec. The following day, ribuck sent him 0.42 BTC in the first portable-to-portable Bitcoin transaction.
* December 9, 2010
** The generation difficulty passed 10,000.
** First bitcoin call option contract sold, from nanotube to [[User:Sgornick|sgornick]], via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* December 16, 2010
** [http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ Bitcoin Pooled Mining], operated by slush, found its first block
* January 2, 2011
** [[Tonal BitCoin]] units standardized.
* January 8, 2011
** [[History of Bitcoin]] page (this page) created after replicating from original Bitcoin History page on Bitcoin.org.
** Bitcoin Pooled Mining reached a total of 10,000 Mhash/s
* January 27, 2011
** Largest numeric value ever traded for bitcoins thus far occurred on this date. Three currency bills from Zimbabwe, known as Zimdollars, were traded on [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] at the rate of 4 BTC for each of the one-hundred trillion dollar ($100,000,000,000,000) Zimbabwe notes<ref>Serial numbers for Zimdollars sold: AA1669317, AA1669318 and AA1669319</ref>
* January 28, 2011
** Block 105000 was generated. This means that 5.25 million bitcoins have been generated, which is just over one-quarter of the eventual total of nearly 21 million.
* February 9, 2011
** Bitcoin reached parity with the US dollar, touching $1 per BTC at [[MtGox]].
* February 10, 2011
** Bitcoin.org website struggles to handle [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3444.0 traffic] resulting from mentions on Slashdot<ref>[http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/Online-Only-Currency-BitCoin-Reaches-Dollar-Parity Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity]</ref>, Hacker News and Twitter following the news that parity had been reached.
* February 14, 2011
** A vehicle was, for the first time, offered in exchange for a certain number of bitcoins<ref>[http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3485.0 Car for Sale - Australia]</ref>.
* March 6, 2011
** Total Bitcoin network computation speed for a short time [http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png reached an all-time high of almost 900Ghash/sec], dropping to 500Ghash/sec soon after. Some speculate that this was due to some supercomputer or bot-net that joined the network ([http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html mystery miner]).
* March 18, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches a 6-week low point at almost $0.70/BTC, after what appeared to be a short burst of, possibly automated, BTC sales at progressively lower prices. BTC price had been declining since the February 9 high.
* March 25, 2011
** Difficulty decreased nearly 10%. A decrease has only occurred once before, and this decrease of nearly 10% was the largest.
* March 27, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the British Pound Sterling BTC/GBP, [[Britcoin]], opens.
* March 31, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from Brazilian Reals, [[Bitcoin Brazil]], opens.
* April 5, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the Polish złoty, [[BitMarket.eu]], opens.
* April 12, 2011
** First bitcoin put option contract sold via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* April 16, 2011
** TIME does [http://techland.time.com/2011/04/16/online-cash-bitcoin-could-challenge-governments/ an article on Bitcoin].
* April 23, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the Euro (EUR) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the British Sterling Pound (GBP) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** Value of the Bitcoin money stock at current exchange rate passes $10 million USD threshold.
* April 27, 2011
** [[VirWoX]] opens first market to trade bitcoins against a virtual currency on BTC/SL (Second Life Lindens) exchange.
* April 28, 2011
** Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/120630 120,630] is first to be mined using split allocation of the generation reward.
* April 30, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 100,000.
* May 10, 2011
** The exchange rate at [[MtGox]] touched 6 USD per BTC.
* June 3, 2011
** [[Tonal Bitcoin]] reached parity with the US cent, touching 1¢ per TBC at [[Bitcoin Market]].
* June 24, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 1,000,000 with Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/133056 133056].

==References==
<references />

Category:History

2011-06-24T21:44:56Z

Ribuck: Spelling (passwd -> passed)

* August 18, 2008
** Domain name "bitcoin.org" registered.
* October 31, 2008
** [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/12588/ Bitcoin design paper] published
* November 09, 2008
** Bitcoin project registered at SourceForge.net
* January 3, 2009
** Genesis block established at 18:15:05 GMT
* January 11, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.1 released and announced on the [http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10152.html cryptography mailing list]
* December 16, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.2 released
* December 30, 2009
** First difficulty increase at 06:11:04 GMT
* February 6, 2010
** [[Bitcoin Market]] established
* May 22, 2010
** laszlo first to buy pizza with Bitcoins [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195 agreeing] upon paying 10,000 BTC for ~$25 worth of pizza courtesy of jercos
* July 7, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 released
* July 11, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 release [http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/Bitcoin-Releases-Version-03 mentioned on slashdot], bringing a large influx of new bitcoin users.
* July 12, 2010
** Beginning of a 10x increase in exchange value over a 5 day period, from about $0.008/BTC to $0.08/BTC
* July 17, 2010
** [[MtGox]] established
* July 18, 2010
** ArtForz generated his first block after establishing his personal OpenCL GPU hash farm
* August 15, 2010
** Bug in the bitcoin code allows a bad transaction into block 74638. Users quickly adopt fixed code and the "good" block chain overtook the bad one at a block height of 74691, 53 blocks later ([[Incidents#Value_overflow]]).
* September 14, 2010
** jgarzik [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg12921#msg12921 offered] 10,000 BTC (valued at ~$600-650) to puddinpop to open source their windows-based CUDA client
* September 18, 2010
** puddinpop [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg13135#msg13135 released] source to their windows-based CUDA client under MIT license
* September 29, 2010
** kermit [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1306.0 discovered] a microtransactions exploit which precipitated the Bitcoin v0.3.13 release
* October 01, 2010
** First public OpenCL miner released
* October 04, 2010
** Original Bitcoin History wiki page (this page) established (ooh so meta) on Bitcoin.org's wiki.
* October 07, 2010
** Exchange rate started climbing up from $0.06/BTC after several flat months.
* October 28, 2010
** First bitcoin short sale transaction initiated, with a loan of 100 BTC by nanotube to [[User:Kiba|kiba]], facilitated by the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* November 6, 2010
** The [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1672 Bitcoin economy passed US $1 million]. The MtGox price touched USD $0.50/BTC.
* December 7, 2010
** Bitcoind was compiled for the Nokia N900 mobile computer by doublec. The following day, ribuck sent him 0.42 BTC in the first portable-to-portable Bitcoin transaction.
* December 9, 2010
** The generation difficulty passed 10,000.
** First bitcoin call option contract sold, from nanotube to [[User:Sgornick|sgornick]], via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* December 16, 2010
** [http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ Bitcoin Pooled Mining], operated by slush, found its first block
* January 2, 2011
** [[Tonal BitCoin]] units standardized.
* January 8, 2011
** [[History of Bitcoin]] page (this page) created after replicating from original Bitcoin History page on Bitcoin.org.
** Bitcoin Pooled Mining reached a total of 10,000 Mhash/s
* January 27, 2011
** Largest numeric value ever traded for bitcoins thus far occurred on this date. Three currency bills from Zimbabwe, known as Zimdollars, were traded on [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] at the rate of 4 BTC for each of the one-hundred trillion dollar ($100,000,000,000,000) Zimbabwe notes<ref>Serial numbers for Zimdollars sold: AA1669317, AA1669318 and AA1669319</ref>
* January 28, 2011
** Block 105000 was generated. This means that 5.25 million bitcoins have been generated, which is just over one-quarter of the eventual total of nearly 21 million.
* February 9, 2011
** Decimal Bitcoin reached parity with the US dollar, touching $1 per BTC at [[MtGox]].
* February 10, 2011
** Bitcoin.org website struggles to handle [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3444.0 traffic] resulting from mentions on Slashdot<ref>[http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/Online-Only-Currency-BitCoin-Reaches-Dollar-Parity Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity]</ref>, Hacker News and Twitter following the news that parity had been reached.
* February 14, 2011
** A vehicle was, for the first time, offered in exchange for a certain number of bitcoins<ref>[http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3485.0 Car for Sale - Australia]</ref>.
* March 6, 2011
** Total Bitcoin network computation speed for a short time [http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png reached an all-time high of almost 900Ghash/sec], dropping to 500Ghash/sec soon after. Some speculate that this was due to some supercomputer or bot-net that joined the network ([http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html mystery miner]).
* March 18, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches a 6-week low point at almost $0.70/BTC, after what appeared to be a short burst of, possibly automated, BTC sales at progressively lower prices. BTC price had been declining since the February 9 high.
* March 25, 2011
** Difficulty decreased nearly 10%. A decrease has only occurred once before, and this decrease of nearly 10% was the largest.
* March 27, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the British Pound Sterling BTC/GBP, [[Britcoin]], opens.
* March 31, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from Brazilian Reals, [[Bitcoin Brazil]], opens.
* April 5, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the Polish złoty, [[BitMarket.eu]], opens.
* April 12, 2011
** First bitcoin put option contract sold via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* April 16, 2011
** TIME does [http://techland.time.com/2011/04/16/online-cash-bitcoin-could-challenge-governments/ an article on Bitcoin].
* April 23, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the Euro (EUR) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the British Sterling Pound (GBP) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** Value of the Bitcoin money stock at current exchange rate passes $10 million USD threshold.
* April 27, 2011
** [[VirWoX]] opens first market to trade bitcoins against a virtual currency on BTC/SL (Second Life Lindens) exchange.
* April 28, 2011
** Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/120630 120,630] is first to be mined using split allocation of the generation reward.
* April 30, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 100,000.
* May 10, 2011
** The exchange rate at [[MtGox]] touched 6 USD per BTC.
* June 3, 2011
** [[Tonal Bitcoin]] reached parity with the US cent, touching 1¢ per TBC at [[Bitcoin Market]].
* June 24, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 1,000,000 with Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/133056 133056].

==References==
<references />

Category:History

2011-05-11T10:15:42Z

Ribuck: MtGox exchange rate exceeded $5/BTC on May 10 2011

* October 31, 2008
** [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/12588/ Bitcoin design paper] published
* November 09, 2008
** Bitcoin project registered at SourceForge.net
* January 3, 2009
** Genesis block established at 18:15:05 GMT
* January 11, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.1 released and announced on the [http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10152.html cryptography mailing list]
* December 16, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.2 released
* December 30, 2009
** First difficulty increase at 06:11:04 GMT
* February 6, 2010
** [[Bitcoin Market]] established
* May 22, 2010
** lazslo first to buy pizza with Bitcoins [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195 agreeing] upon paying 10,000 BTC for ~$25 worth of pizza courtesy of jercos
* July 7, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 released
* July 11, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 release [http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/Bitcoin-Releases-Version-03 mentioned on slashdot], bringing a large influx of new bitcoin users.
* July 17, 2010
** [[MtGox]] established
* July 18, 2010
** ArtForz generated his first block after establishing his personal OpenCL GPU hash farm
* August 15, 2010
** [[Incidents#Value_overflow|74638]]
* September 14, 2010
** jgarzik [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg12921#msg12921 offered] 10,000 BTC (valued at ~$600-650) to puddinpop to open source their windows-based CUDA client
* September 18, 2010
** puddinpop [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg13135#msg13135 released] source to their windows-based CUDA client under MIT license
* September 29, 2010
** kermit [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1306.0 discovered] a microtransactions exploit which precipitated the Bitcoin v0.3.13 release
* October 01, 2010
** First public OpenCL miner released
* October 04, 2010
** Original Bitcoin History wiki page (this page) established (ooh so meta) on Bitcoin.org's wiki.
* October 28, 2010
** First bitcoin short sale transaction initiated, with a loan of 100 BTC by nanotube to [[User:Kiba|kiba]], facilitated by the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* November 6, 2010
** The [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1672 Bitcoin economy passed US $1 million]. The MtGox price touched USD $0.50.
* December 7, 2010
** Bitcoind was compiled for the Nokia N900 mobile computer by doublec. The following day, ribuck sent him 0.42 BTC in the first portable-to-portable Bitcoin transaction.
* December 9, 2010
** The generation difficulty passed 10,000.
** First bitcoin call option contract sold, from nanotube to [[User:Sgornick|sgornick]], via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* December 16, 2010
** [http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ Bitcoin Pooled Mining], operated by slush, found its first block
* January 2, 2011
** [[Tonal BitCoin]] units standardized.
* January 8, 2011
** [[History of Bitcoin]] page (this page) created after replicating from original Bitcoin History page on Bitcoin.org.
** Bitcoin Pooled Mining reached a total of 10,000 Mhash/s
* January 27, 2011
** Largest numeric value ever traded for bitcoins thus far occurred on this date. Three currency bills from Zimbabwe, known as Zimdollars, were traded on [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] at the rate of 4 BTC for each of the one-hundred trillion dollar ($100,000,000,000,000) Zimbabwe notes<ref>Serial numbers for Zimdollars sold: AA1669317, AA1669318 and AA1669319</ref>
* January 28, 2011
** Block 105000 was generated. This means that 5.25 million bitcoins have been generated, which is just over one-quarter of the eventual total of nearly 21 million.
* February 9, 2011
** Bitcoin reached parity with the US dollar, touching $1 per BTC at [[MtGox]].
* February 10, 2011
** Bitcoin.org website struggles to handle [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3444.0 traffic] resulting from mentions on Slashdot<ref>[http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/Online-Only-Currency-BitCoin-Reaches-Dollar-Parity Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity]</ref>, Hacker News and Twitter following the news that parity had been reached.
* February 14, 2011
** A vehicle was, for the first time, offered in exchange for a certain number of bitcoins<ref>[http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3485.0 Car for Sale - Australia]</ref>.
* March 6, 2011
** Total Bitcoin network computation speed for a short time [http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png reached an all-time high of almost 900Ghash/sec], dropping to 500Ghash/sec soon after. Some speculate that this was due to some supercomputer or bot-net that joined the network ([http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html mystery miner]).
* March 18, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches a 6-week low point at almost $0.70/BTC, after what appeared to be a short burst of, possibly automated, BTC sales at progressively lower prices. BTC price had been declining since the February 9 high.
* March 25, 2011
** Difficulty decreased nearly 10%. A decrease has only occurred once before, and this decrease of nearly 10% was the largest.
* March 27, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the British Pound Sterling BTC/GBP, [[Britcoin]], opens.
* March 31, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from Brazilian Reals, [[Bitcoin Brazil]], opens.
* April 5, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the Polish złoty, [[BitMarket.eu]], opens.
* April 12, 2011
** First bitcoin put option contract sold via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* April 16, 2011
** TIME does [http://techland.time.com/2011/04/16/online-cash-bitcoin-could-challenge-governments/ an article on Bitcoin].
* April 23, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the Euro (EUR) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the British Sterling Pound (GBP) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** Value of the Bitcoin money stock at current exchange rate passes $10 million USD threshold.
* April 27, 2011
** [[VirWoX]] opens first market to trade bitcoins against a virtual currency on BTC/SL (Second Life Lindens) exchange.
* April 28, 2011
** Block [http://blockexplorer.com/b/120630 120,630] is first to be mined using split allocation of the generation reward.
* April 30, 2011
** The generation difficulty passed 100,000.
* May 10, 2011
** The exchange rate at [[MtGox]] exceeded $5 per bitcoin.

{{fromold|bitcoin_history}}

==References==
<references />

Units

2011-05-05T15:58:36Z

Ribuck: /* Bitcoin sub-units */

==Bitcoin sub-units==

{| border="1"
|-
! Bitcoins
! Description
! Abbreviation
|-
| 1.00 || One bitcoin || BTC
|-
| 0.01 || One bitcent ||
|-
| 0.001 || One millibitcoin (nickname "Millie") || mBTC
|-
| 0.000001 || One microbitcoin (nickname "Mike") || μBTC or uBTC
|-
| 0.00000001 || One satoshi (the minimum Bitcoin base unit)
|}

This terminology is unofficial, but the terms "bitcent" and "satoshi" seem to have been accepted into common usage.

==Tonal sub-units==

Tonal sub-units are a hexadecimal system and are not widely used.

{| border="1" style="text-align:right;font-family:Console, Luxi Mono, fixed"
|- style="background-color:silver"
! Abbreviation
! Pronunciation
! style="background-color: #7fdfdf" | Decimal (BTC)
! style="background-color: #7fdf7f" | [[Tonal BitCoin|Tonal (TBC)]]
! Tonal, as Hexadecimal
|-
|colspan="2"| Maximum BitCoins ever<ref>[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28sum%28210000*floor%285000000000%2F2^i%29%29%2C+i%3D0+to+32%29%2F10000000 Wolfram|Alpha]</ref>
| 20,999,999.9769    
| 7,750,54.00 
| 7,75f0,59e4.009 
|- style="background-color:lime"
|
| Tam-BitCoin
| 2,814,749.76710656
| 1,0000,0000     
| 1,0000,0000     
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| MBTC
| Mega-BitCoin
| 1,000,000         
| 593,1079.4   
| 5af3,107a.4   
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| kBTC
| Kilo-BitCoin
| 1,000         
| 17,4876.8  
| 17,4876.e8  
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| hBTC
| Hecto-BitCoin
| 100         
| 2,540.4  
| 2,540b.e4  
|-
|colspan="2"| Initial block reward
| 50         
| 1,2905.2  
| 1,2a05.f2  
|- style="background-color:lime"
| ᵇTBC
| Bong-BitCoin
| 42.94967296
| 1,0000     
| 1,0000     
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| daBTC
| Deca-BitCoin
| 10         
| 39.9  
| 3b9a.ca  
|- style="background-color:lime"
| ᵐTBC
| Mill-BitCoin
| 2.68435456
| 1000     
| 1000     
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| BTC
| *BitCoin
| 1         
| 55.1  
| 5f5.e1  
|- style="background-color:lime"
| ˢTBC
| San-Bitcoin
| 0.16777216
| 100     
| 100     
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| dBTC
| Deci-BitCoin
| 0.1       
| 8.68 
| 98.968 
|- style="background-color:lime"
| ᵗTBC
| Ton-BitCoin
| 0.01048576
| 10     
| 10     
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| cBTC
| Centi-BitCoin
| 0.01      
| .424 
| f.424 
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| mBTC
| Milli-BitCoin
| 0.001     
| 1.869 
| 1.86a 
|- style="background-color:lime"
| TBC
| *BitCoin
| 0.00065536
| 1     
| 1     
|- style="background-color:lime"
| TBCᵗ
| BitCoin-ton
| 0.00004096
| 0.1   
| 0.1   
|- style="background-color:lime"
| TBCˢ
| BitCoin-san
| 0.00000256
| 0.01  
| 0.01  
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| μBTC
| Micro-BitCoin
| 0.000001  
| 0.0064
| 0.0064
|- style="background-color:lime"
| TBCᵐ
| BitCoin-mill
| 0.00000016
| 0.001 
| 0.001 
|- style="background-color:lime"
| TBCᵇ
| BitCoin-bong
| 0.00000001
| 0.0001
| 0.0001
|}
<small>* Tonal BitCoin and Decimal BitCoin can be differentiated by the pronunciation of the numbers. "One bitcoin", "two bitcoin", etc is decimal, but "an bitcoin", "de bitcoin" is tonal.</small>

<references />

Units

2011-05-05T15:53:25Z

Ribuck: Sub-unit names

==Bitcoin sub-units==

{| border="1"
|-
| 1.00 || One bitcoin (abbreviation BTC)
|-
| 0.01 || One bitcent
|-
| 0.001 || One millibitcoin (nickname "Millie")
|-
| 0.000001 || One microbitcoin (nickname "Mike")
|-
| 0.00000001 || One satoshi (the minimum Bitcoin base unit)
|}

This terminology is unofficial, but the terms "bitcent" and "satoshi" seem to have been accepted into common usage.

==Tonal sub-units==

Tonal sub-units are a hexadecimal system and are not widely used.

{| border="1" style="text-align:right;font-family:Console, Luxi Mono, fixed"
|- style="background-color:silver"
! Abbreviation
! Pronunciation
! style="background-color: #7fdfdf" | Decimal (BTC)
! style="background-color: #7fdf7f" | [[Tonal BitCoin|Tonal (TBC)]]
! Tonal, as Hexadecimal
|-
|colspan="2"| Maximum BitCoins ever<ref>[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28sum%28210000*floor%285000000000%2F2^i%29%29%2C+i%3D0+to+32%29%2F10000000 Wolfram|Alpha]</ref>
| 20,999,999.9769    
| 7,750,54.00 
| 7,75f0,59e4.009 
|- style="background-color:lime"
|
| Tam-BitCoin
| 2,814,749.76710656
| 1,0000,0000     
| 1,0000,0000     
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| MBTC
| Mega-BitCoin
| 1,000,000         
| 593,1079.4   
| 5af3,107a.4   
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| kBTC
| Kilo-BitCoin
| 1,000         
| 17,4876.8  
| 17,4876.e8  
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| hBTC
| Hecto-BitCoin
| 100         
| 2,540.4  
| 2,540b.e4  
|-
|colspan="2"| Initial block reward
| 50         
| 1,2905.2  
| 1,2a05.f2  
|- style="background-color:lime"
| ᵇTBC
| Bong-BitCoin
| 42.94967296
| 1,0000     
| 1,0000     
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| daBTC
| Deca-BitCoin
| 10         
| 39.9  
| 3b9a.ca  
|- style="background-color:lime"
| ᵐTBC
| Mill-BitCoin
| 2.68435456
| 1000     
| 1000     
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| BTC
| *BitCoin
| 1         
| 55.1  
| 5f5.e1  
|- style="background-color:lime"
| ˢTBC
| San-Bitcoin
| 0.16777216
| 100     
| 100     
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| dBTC
| Deci-BitCoin
| 0.1       
| 8.68 
| 98.968 
|- style="background-color:lime"
| ᵗTBC
| Ton-BitCoin
| 0.01048576
| 10     
| 10     
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| cBTC
| Centi-BitCoin
| 0.01      
| .424 
| f.424 
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| mBTC
| Milli-BitCoin
| 0.001     
| 1.869 
| 1.86a 
|- style="background-color:lime"
| TBC
| *BitCoin
| 0.00065536
| 1     
| 1     
|- style="background-color:lime"
| TBCᵗ
| BitCoin-ton
| 0.00004096
| 0.1   
| 0.1   
|- style="background-color:lime"
| TBCˢ
| BitCoin-san
| 0.00000256
| 0.01  
| 0.01  
|- style="background-color:cyan"
| μBTC
| Micro-BitCoin
| 0.000001  
| 0.0064
| 0.0064
|- style="background-color:lime"
| TBCᵐ
| BitCoin-mill
| 0.00000016
| 0.001 
| 0.001 
|- style="background-color:lime"
| TBCᵇ
| BitCoin-bong
| 0.00000001
| 0.0001
| 0.0001
|}
<small>* Tonal BitCoin and Decimal BitCoin can be differentiated by the pronunciation of the numbers. "One bitcoin", "two bitcoin", etc is decimal, but "an bitcoin", "de bitcoin" is tonal.</small>

<references />

Vocabulary

2011-05-05T15:30:08Z

Ribuck: "Satoshi" as a term sometimes used for the Bitcoin base unit

;'''Bitcoin'''
: The name of a decentralized p2p crypto-currency application.
;'''[[Bitcoins]]''' ''(abbreviated BTC)''
: The currency used and generated within the Bitcoin system.
;'''[[Block]]'''
: Blocks are links in a chain of transaction verifications. Outstanding transactions get bundled into a block and are verified roughly every ten minutes on average. Each subsequent block strengthens the verification of previous blocks. Each block contains one or more transactions.
;'''[[Block Chain]]'''
: Each block includes the difficult-to-produce verification hash of the previous block. This allows each subsequent block to be linked to all previous blocks. These blocks which are linked together for the purpose of verifying transactions within blocks is called the block chain.
;'''Branching Point'''
: The block at which the block chain diverges into multiple chain branches
;'''Chain Branching'''
;'''Checkpoint Lockin'''
: Every once in a while, a recent block hash is hardcoded into Bitcoin. This prevents pretty much any possible attack from affecting transactions made up to this point. No matter what happens (except perhaps if SHA-256 is broken), these transactions will survive. Satoshi announced the feature [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=437 here] and it was discussed to death [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1647 here].
;'''Coinbase'''
: "Coinbase" is another name for a generation transaction. The input of such a transaction contains some arbitrary data where the scriptSig would go in normal transactions -- this data is sometimes called the "coinbase", as well.
;'''[[Confirmation]]'''
: To protect against double spending, a transaction should not be considered as "confirmed" until a certain number of blocks in the block chain confirm, or verify that the transaction. The classic bitcoin client will show a transaction as "n/unconfirmed" until 6 blocks confirm the transaction.
;'''[[Difficulty]]'''
: Every 2016 blocks, Bitcoin adjusts the difficulty of verifying blocks based on the time it took to verify the previous 2016 blocks. The difficulty is adjusted so that given the average estimated computing power of the whole bitcoin network, only one block will verified on average every ten minutes for the next 2016 blocks. The difficulty is usually expressed as a number, optionally accurate to to many decimal places (eg. in [http://blockexplorer.com/b/100000 block 100,000] it was 14,484.162361. The difficulty is inversely proportional to the hash target, which is expressed as a hex number with around 50 digits, and is the number under which a block's generated hash must be to qualify as an officially verified block. The hash target is equal to ((65535 << 208) / difficulty). Difficulty is also often called block difficulty, hash difficulty, verification difficulty or the difficulty of generating bitcoins.
;'''Discouraged block'''
: A discouraged [[block]] is considered to be a valid part of the chain, but blocks you generate will build onto the block before it instead of that block. If most of the network is discouraging a block, then it will almost always be replaced by another block and not end up making it into the final [[block chain]]. Unlike rejecting a block, discouraging a block has no risk of splitting the network. Bitcoin currently doesn't discourage any blocks, but the mechanism may be used in the future to handle certain issues such as unreasonably high or low fees.
;'''Double Spending'''
: Attempting to spend coins that have already been spent in another transaction
;'''Generate Bitcoins'''
: The phrase generating bitcoins comes from the file menu option 'Generate Coins' in the Bitcoin which enables or disables the CPU intensive process of verifying blocks. When Bitcoin verifies a block before any other Bitcoin client, it receives newly minted bitcoins and the transaction fees which may or may not be included in the verified block. The amount of bitcoins awarded for verifying a block is ?50.00 for the first 210,000 blocks and half the previous amount of bitcoins for each subsequent 210,000 blocks. On average, 210,000 blocks take about 4 years to verify. The total amount of bitcoins that will ever be minted is roughly 21,000,000.00000000. Currently the decimal places more than two to the right of the decimal point are not displayed in the official Bitcoin client.
;'''[[Hash]]'''
: A computer algorithm which produces an identification key that can be used to easily verify that data has not been altered. If you change any single bit of the original data and run the hash algorithm, the hash will completely change. Because the hash is seemingly random, it is prohibitively difficult to try to produce a specific hash by changing the data which is being hashed.
;'''Memory pool'''
: Generators store [[transactions]] waiting to get into a block in their memory pool after receiving them. Received transactions are stored even if they are invalid to prevent nodes from constantly requesting transactions that they've already seen. The memory pool is cleared when Bitcoin is shut down, causing the [[network]] to gradually forget about transactions that haven't been included in a [[block]].
;'''Merkle root'''
: Every [[transactions|transaction]] has a [[hash]] associated with it. In a [[block]], all of the transaction hashes in the block are themselves hashed (sometimes several times -- the exact process is complex), and the result is the Merkle root. In other words, the Merkle root is the hash of all the hashes of all the transactions in the block. The Merkle root is included in the [[block hashing algorithm|block header]]. With this scheme, it is possible to securely verify that a transaction has been accepted by the network (and get the number of confirmations) by downloading just the tiny block headers and [[Wikipedia:Merkle tree|Merkle tree]] -- downloading the entire block chain is unnecessary. This feature is currently not used in Bitcoin, but it will be in the future.
;''' Miner'''
: Computer software which is designed to repeatedly calculate hashes with the intention to create a successful block and earn coins from transaction fees and new coins created with the block itself. The term references an analogy of gold miners who dig gold out of the ground and thus "discover" new gold that can be used to create new coins with a similar kind of discovery occurring with a successful hash to create new Bitcoins.
;'''Node'''
: Each Bitcoin client currently running within the network is referred to as a Node of the system.
;'''Nonce'''
: A nonce is an otherwise meaningless number which is used to alter the outcome of a hash. Each time Bitcoin hashes a block, it increments a nonce within the block which it is trying verify. If the numeric value of the effectively random hash is below a certain amount determined by the block generation difficulty, then the block is accepted by other clients and gets added to the chain.
;'''Orphan block'''
: An orphan block is a block that is not in the currently-longest [[block chain]].
;'''[[Proof of work]]'''
: A result that can only be obtained through the use of computational resources. Changing the data in the proof of work requires redoing the work.
;'''Reorganize'''
: A block chain reorganize (or '''reorg''') happens when one chain becomes longer than the one you are currently working on. All of the blocks in the old chain that are not in the new one become orphan blocks, and their generations are invalidated. Transactions that use the newly-invalid generated coins also become invalid, though this is only possible in large chain splits because generations can't be spent for 100 blocks. The number of confirmations for transactions may change after a reorg, and transactions that are not in the new chain will become "0/unconfirmed" again. If a transaction in the old chain conflicts with one in the new chain (as a result of double-spending), the old one becomes invalid.
;'''Satoshi'''
: The base unit of Bitcoin (0.00000001 BTC) is sometimes called a Satoshi, after Bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
;'''Subsidy'''
: The block subsidy is the BTC created for generating a block. The subsidy is halved every four years.
;'''Super Nodes'''
: A participant in a p2p network which connects to as many other nodes as possible.
;'''[[Tonal BitCoin]]''' ''(abbreviated TBC)''
: Adaptation of Bitcoin to the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Nystrom#Tonal_System_.28Hexadecimal.29 Tonal System]. 1 TBC is defined as 1,0000 (65,536 decimal) base bitcoin units. Not widely used.
;'''[[Transaction Fee]]'''
: A voluntary fee which can be added to a transaction which is used as an incentive to add the bitcoin transaction to a block. The fee determines the likelihood of inclusion in any given block, where a high fee included with a transaction has a priority over transactions with a lower fee included or no fee at all.
;'''Virgin bitcoin'''
: The reward for generating a [[Block|block]] that has not yet been spent, a state which might increase the ability to transact [[anonymity|anonymously]].

{{fromold|bitcoin_vocabulary}}

[[Category:Technical]]
[[Category:Vocabulary| ]]

Bitcoin symbol

2011-04-26T15:23:48Z

Ribuck: /* Unicode symbol */ Spelling correction

There is no official Bitcoin symbol as of December 2010, however the ''BTC'' abbreviation is the most universally accepted form.

== Unicode symbol ==

There is a discussion over [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=369.0 which Unicode symbol might be the best suited] for bitcoin.

To type Unicode characters, refer to:

* [[Microsoft Windows Unicode Input]]
* [[How to easily type the circled B symbol on a Mac]]

It has led to the following options:

{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! Proposed character !! Description & Pros & Cons !! Unicode name !! Unicode decimal input !! Unicode hex input
|-
| ฿ ||
* Pros: Gives a currency-like look (it is the symbol for an existing currency, the Thai Baht, but other currency symbols often get reused, like the $); displayed correctly on all known OSes
* Cons: It is already used for the Thai currency, and might confuse people
|| THAI CURRENCY SYMBOL BAHT || || Alt +0E3F
|-
| Ⓑ ||
*Pros: Similar to current bitcoin.org logo
|| CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B || || Alt +24B7
|-
| ⓑ ||
*Pros: Small b represent the unit bit in computer where capital B is Byte
* Cons: Small fonts are harder to read
|| CIRCLED LATIN SMALL LETTER B || ||Alt +24D1
|-
|ᴃ|| || LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL BARRED B || ||Alt +1D03
|-
|Ƀ|| || LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B WITH STROKE || ||Alt +0243
|-
|B⃦|| || || ||
|-
|␢|| || (Unicode Block: Control Pictures) BLANK SYMBOL (graphic for space) || || Alt +2422
|-
|β|| || GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA || ||Alt +03B2
|-
|¤|| || CURRENCY SIGN ||Alt 0164 ||Alt +00A4
|-
|Ƅ|| || LATIN CAPITAL LETTER TONE SIX || ||Alt +0184
|-
|∄|| || (Unicode Block: Mathematical Operators) THERE DOES NOT EXIST || ||Alt +2204
|-
|ઘ|| || GUJARATI LETTER GHA (Indo-Aryan language) || ||Alt +0A98
|-
|ϭ|| || (Unicode Block: Greek and Coptic) COPTIC SMALL LETTER SHIMA || ||Alt +03ED
|-
|[[Image:Bitcoin Symbol Suggestion circled struck-through B.png|20px]]||
* Cons: Does not exist in the Unicode standard
|| || ||
|-
|[[Image:Bitcoin Symbol Suggestion rotated power.png|20px]]||
* Cons: Does not exist in the Unicode standard
|| || ||
|-
|ⓢ|| Purposed as a smaller unit of bitcoin. E.g. A hundredth of a bitcoin || CIRCLED LATIN SMALL LETTER S || || Alt +24E2
|-
|[[Image:Bat.png|32x32px|alt=The b'at]]
the b'at
||
* Pros: Is round like a coin. Contains the B for Bitcoin. Borrows a style widelly associated with the internet. Not used for other meanings.
* Cons: Does not exist in the Unicode standard
|| || ||
|-
|A 'C' with '1' and '0' inside [[http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/8840/bitcoinlogodraft.png]]||
* Cons: Does not exist in the Unicode standard
|| || ||
|-
|A 'C' with a 'circle' and 'dot' inside [[http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/6006/bitcoinlogodraftii.png]]||
* Cons: Does not exist in the Unicode standard
|| || ||
|-
| ◪|| || (Unicode Block: Geometric Shapes) SQUARE WITH LOWER RIGHT DIAGONAL HALF BLACK || || Alt +25EA
|-
|[[http://hosting11.imagecross.com/image-hosting-61/2381unicode1s.png]][[http://hosting11.imagecross.com/image-hosting-61/162bitcoin_uni_s.png]]||
* Cons: Does not exist in the Unicode standard
|| || ||
|-
|☺|| ||WHITE SMILING FACE|| || Alt +263A
|-
|☻|| ||BLACK SMILING FACE|| || Alt +263B
|-
|㋡|| ||CIRCLED KATAKANA TU' (Japanese)|| || Alt +32E1
|-
| || || || ||
|}

Category:History

2011-04-24T12:41:58Z

Ribuck: April 23 2011: Capitalization of Bitcoin economy passed $10m.

* October 31, 2008
** [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/12588/ Bitcoin design paper] published
* November 09, 2008
** Bitcoin project registered at SourceForge.net
* January 3, 2009
** Genesis block established at 18:15:05 GMT
* January 11, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.1 released and announced on the [http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10152.html cryptography mailing list]
* December 16, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.2 released
* December 30, 2009
** First difficulty increase at 06:11:04 GMT
* February 6, 2010
** [[Bitcoin Market]] established
* May 22, 2010
** lazslo first to buy pizza with Bitcoins [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195 agreeing] upon paying 10,000 BTC for ~$25 worth of pizza courtesy of jercos
* July 7, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 released
* July 11, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 release [http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/Bitcoin-Releases-Version-03 mentioned on slashdot], bringing a large influx of new bitcoin users.
* July 17, 2010
** [[MtGox]] established
* July 18, 2010
** ArtForz generated his first block after establishing his personal OpenCL GPU hash farm
* August 15, 2010
** [[Incidents#Value_overflow|74638]]
* September 14, 2010
** jgarzik [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg12921#msg12921 offered] 10,000 BTC (valued at ~$600-650) to puddinpop to open source their windows-based CUDA client
* September 18, 2010
** puddinpop [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg13135#msg13135 released] source to their windows-based CUDA client under MIT license
* September 29, 2010
** kermit [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1306.0 discovered] a microtransactions exploit which precipitated the Bitcoin v0.3.13 release
* October 01, 2010
** First public OpenCL miner released
* October 04, 2010
** Original Bitcoin History wiki page (this page) established (ooh so meta) on Bitcoin.org's wiki.
* October 28, 2010
** First bitcoin short sale transaction initiated, with a loan of 100 BTC by nanotube to [[User:Kiba|kiba]], facilitated by the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* November 6, 2010
** The [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1672 Bitcoin economy passed US $1 million]. The MtGox price touched USD $0.50.
* December 7, 2010
** Bitcoind was compiled for the Nokia N900 mobile computer by doublec. The following day, ribuck sent him 0.42 BTC in the first portable-to-portable Bitcoin transaction.
* December 9, 2010
** The generation difficulty passed 10,000.
** First bitcoin call option contract sold, from nanotube to [[User:Sgornick|sgornick]], via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* December 16, 2010
** [http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ Bitcoin Pooled Mining], operated by slush, found its first block
* January 2, 2011
** [[Tonal BitCoin]] units described, for the minority who prefer not to use decimal notation.
* January 8, 2011
** [[History of Bitcoin]] page (this page) created after replicating from original Bitcoin History page on Bitcoin.org.
** Bitcoin Pooled Mining reached a total of 10,000 Mhash/s
* January 27, 2011
** Largest numeric value ever traded for bitcoins thus far occurred on this date. Three currency bills from Zimbabwe, known as Zimdollars, were traded on [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] at the rate of 4 BTC for each of the one-hundred trillion dollar ($100,000,000,000,000) Zimbabwe notes<ref>Serial numbers for Zimdollars sold: AA1669317, AA1669318 and AA1669319</ref>
* January 28, 2011
** Block 105000 was generated. This means that 5.25 million bitcoins have been generated, which is just over one-quarter of the eventual total of nearly 21 million.
* February 9, 2011
** Bitcoin reached parity with the US dollar, touching $1 per BTC at [[MtGox]].
* February 10, 2011
** Bitcoin.org website struggles to handle [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3444.0 traffic] resulting from mentions on Slashdot<ref>[http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/Online-Only-Currency-BitCoin-Reaches-Dollar-Parity Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity]</ref>, Hacker News and Twitter following the news that parity had been reached.
* February 14, 2011
** A vehicle was, for the first time, offered in exchange for a certain number of bitcoins<ref>[http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3485.0 Car for Sale - Australia]</ref>.
* March 6, 2011
** Total Bitcoin network computation speed for a short time [http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png reached an all-time high of almost 900Ghash/sec], dropping to 500Ghash/sec soon after. Some speculate that this was due to some supercomputer or bot-net that joined the network ([http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mysteryminer.html mystery miner]).
* March 18, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches a 6-week low point at almost $0.70/BTC, after what appeared to be a short burst of, possibly automated, BTC sales at progressively lower prices. BTC price had been declining since the February 9 high.
* March 25, 2011
** Difficulty decreased nearly 10%. A decrease has only occurred once before, and this decrease of nearly 10% was the largest.
* March 27, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the British Pound Sterling BTC/GBP, [[Britcoin]], opens.
* March 31, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from Brazilian Reals, [[Bitcoin Brazil]], opens.
* April 5, 2011
** The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the Polish złoty, [[BitMarket.eu]], opens.
* April 12, 2011
** First bitcoin put option contract sold via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* April 16, 2011
** TIME does [http://techland.time.com/2011/04/16/online-cash-bitcoin-could-challenge-governments/ an article on Bitcoin].
* April 23, 2011
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the Euro (EUR) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** BTC/USD exchange rate reaches and passes parity with the British Sterling Pound (GBP) on [[MtGox]] exchange.
** Capitalization of the Bitcoin economy passed US $10 million.

{{fromold|bitcoin_history}}

==References==
<references />

Category:History

2011-02-09T20:07:29Z

Ribuck: MtGox parity with USD

Vocabulary

2011-02-08T11:27:50Z

Ribuck: Tonal BTC not widely used.

;'''Bitcoin'''
: The name of a decentralized p2p crypto-currency application.
;'''[[Bitcoins]]''' ''(abbreviated BTC)''
: The currency used and generated within the Bitcoin system.
;'''[[Block]]'''
: Blocks are links in a chain of transaction verifications. Outstanding transactions get bundled into a block and are verified roughly every ten minutes on average. Each subsequent block strengthens the verification of previous blocks. Each block contains one or more transactions.
;'''[[Block Chain]]'''
: Each block includes the difficult-to-produce verification hash of the previous block. This allows each subsequent block to be linked to all previous blocks. These blocks which are linked together for the purpose of verifying transactions within blocks is called the block chain.
;'''Branching Point'''
: The block at which the block chain diverges into multiple chain branches
;'''Chain Branching'''
;'''Checkpoint Lockin'''
: Every once in a while, a recent block hash is hardcoded into Bitcoin. This prevents pretty much any possible attack from affecting transactions made up to this point. No matter what happens (except perhaps if SHA-256 is broken), these transactions will survive. Satoshi announced the feature [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=437 here] and it was discussed to death [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1647 here].
;'''Coinbase'''
: "Coinbase" is another name for a generation transaction. The input of such a transaction contains some arbitrary data where the scriptSig would go in normal transactions -- this data is sometimes called the "coinbase", as well.
;'''[[Difficulty]]'''
: Every 2016 blocks, Bitcoin adjusts the difficulty of verifying blocks based on the time it took to verify the previous 2016 blocks. The difficulty is adjusted so that given the average estimated computing power of the whole bitcoin network, only one block will verified on average every ten minutes for the next 2016 blocks. The difficulty is usually expressed as a number, optionally accurate to to many decimal places (eg. in [http://blockexplorer.com/b/100000 block 100,000] it was 14,484.162361. The difficulty is inversely proportional to the hash target, which is expressed as a hex number with around 50 digits, and is the number under which a block's generated hash must be to qualify as an officially verified block. The hash target is equal to ((65535 << 208) / difficulty). Difficulty is also often called block difficulty, hash difficulty, verification difficulty or the difficulty of generating bitcoins.
;'''Discouraged block'''
: A discouraged [[block]] is considered to be a valid part of the chain, but blocks you generate will build onto the block before it instead of that block. If most of the network is discouraging a block, then it will almost always be replaced by another block and not end up making it into the final [[block chain]]. Unlike rejecting a block, discouraging a block has no risk of splitting the network. Bitcoin currently doesn't discourage any blocks, but the mechanism may be used in the future to handle certain issues such as unreasonably high or low fees.
;'''Double Spending'''
: Attempting to spend coins that have already been spent in another transaction
;'''Generate Bitcoins'''
: The phrase generating bitcoins comes from the file menu option 'Generate Coins' in the Bitcoin which enables or disables the CPU intensive process of verifying blocks. When Bitcoin verifies a block before any other Bitcoin client, it receives newly minted bitcoins and the transaction fees which may or may not be included in the verified block. The amount of bitcoins awarded for verifying a block is ?50.00 for the first 210,000 blocks and half the previous amount of bitcoins for each subsequent 210,000 blocks. On average, 210,000 blocks take about 4 years to verify. The total amount of bitcoins that will ever be minted is roughly 21,000,000.00000000. Currently the decimal places more than two to the right of the decimal point are not displayed in the official Bitcoin client.
;'''[[Hash]]'''
: A computer algorithm which produces an identification key that can be used to easily verify that data has not been altered. If you change any single bit of the original data and run the hash algorithm, the hash will completely change. Because the hash is seemingly random, it is prohibitively difficult to try to produce a specific hash by changing the data which is being hashed.
;'''Memory pool'''
: Generators store [[transactions]] waiting to get into a block in their memory pool after receiving them. Received transactions are stored even if they are invalid to prevent nodes from constantly requesting transactions that they've already seen. The memory pool is cleared when Bitcoin is shut down, causing the [[network]] to gradually forget about transactions that haven't been included in a [[block]].
;'''Merkle root'''
: Every [[transactions|transaction]] has a [[hash]] associated with it. In a [[block]], all of the transaction hashes in the block are themselves hashed (sometimes several times -- the exact process is complex), and the result is the Merkle root. In other words, the Merkle root is the hash of all the hashes of all the transactions in the block. The Merkle root is included in the [[block hashing algorithm|block header]]. With this scheme, it is possible to securely verify that a transaction has been accepted by the network (and get the number of confirmations) by downloading just the tiny block headers and [[Wikipedia:Merkle tree|Merkle tree]] -- downloading the entire block chain is unnecessary. This feature is currently not used in Bitcoin, but it will be in the future.
;''' Miner'''
: Computer software which is designed to repeatedly calculate hashes with the intention to create a successful block and earn coins from transaction fees and new coins created with the block itself. The term references an analogy of gold miners who dig gold out of the ground and thus "discover" new gold that can be used to create new coins with a similar kind of discovery occurring with a successful hash to create new Bitcoins.
;'''Node'''
: Each Bitcoin client currently running within the network is referred to as a Node of the system.
;'''Nonce'''
: A nonce is an otherwise meaningless number which is used to alter the outcome of a hash. Each time Bitcoin hashes a block, it increments a nonce within the block which it is trying verify. If the numeric value of the effectively random hash is below a certain amount determined by the block generation difficulty, then the block is accepted by other clients and gets added to the chain.
;'''Orphan block'''
: An orphan block is a block that is not in the currently-longest [[block chain]].
;'''[[Proof of work]]'''
: A result that can only be obtained through the use of computational resources. Changing the data in the proof of work requires redoing the work.
;'''Reorganize'''
: A block chain reorganize (or '''reorg''') happens when one chain becomes longer than the one you are currently working on. All of the blocks in the old chain that are not in the new one become orphan blocks, and their generations are invalidated. Transactions that use the newly-invalid generated coins also become invalid, though this is only possible in large chain splits because generations can't be spent for 100 blocks. The number of confirmations for transactions may change after a reorg, and transactions that are not in the new chain will become "0/unconfirmed" again. If a transaction in the old chain conflicts with one in the new chain (as a result of double-spending), the old one becomes invalid.
;'''Subsidy'''
: The block subsidy is the BTC created for generating a block. The subsidy is halved every four years.
;'''Super Nodes'''
: A participant in a p2p network which connects to as many other nodes as possible.
;'''[[Tonal BitCoin]]''' ''(abbreviated TBC)''
: Adaptation of Bitcoin to the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Nystrom#Tonal_System_.28Hexadecimal.29 Tonal System]. 1 TBC is defined as 1,0000 (65,536 decimal) base bitcoin units. Not widely used.
;'''[[Transaction Fee]]'''
: A voluntary fee which can be added to a transaction which is used as an incentive to add the bitcoin transaction to a block. The fee determines the likelihood of inclusion in any given block, where a high fee included with a transaction has a priority over transactions with a lower fee included or no fee at all.

{{fromold|bitcoin_vocabulary}}

[[Category:Technical]]
[[Category:Vocabulary| ]]

Category:History

2011-01-28T10:46:08Z

Ribuck: One quarter of all bitcions have now been generated

Category:History

2011-01-25T21:24:18Z

Ribuck: Bitcoin Pooled Mining passed 10 GHash/s

* November 09, 2008
** Bitcoin project registered at SourceForge.net
* January 3, 2009
** Genesis block established at 18:15:05 GMT
* January 11, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.1 released and announced on the [http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10152.html cryptography mailing list]
* March 24, 2009
** [http://www.bitcoin.org/sites/default/files/bitcoin.pdf Bitcoin design paper] published
* December 16, 2009
** Bitcoin v0.2 released
* December 30, 2009
** First difficulty increase at 06:11:04 GMT
* February 6, 2010
** [[Bitcoin Market]] established
* May 22, 2010
** lazslo first to buy pizza with Bitcoins [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195 agreeing] upon paying 10,000btc for ~$25 worth of pizza courtesy of jercos
* July 7, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 released
* July 11, 2010
** Bitcoin v0.3 release [http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/Bitcoin-Releases-Version-03 mentioned on slashdot], bringing a large influx of new bitcoin users.
* July 17, 2010
** [[MtGox]] established
* July 18, 2010
** ArtForz generated his first block after establishing his personal OpenCL GPU hash farm
* August 15, 2010
** 74638
* September 14, 2010
** jgarzik [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg12921#msg12921 offered] 10,000btc (valued at ~$600-650) to puddinpop to open source their windows-based CUDA client
* September 18, 2010
** puddinpop [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=133.msg13135#msg13135 released] source to their windows-based CUDA client under MIT license
* September 29, 2010
** kermit [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1306.0 discovered] a microtransactions exploit which precipitated the Bitcoin v0.3.13 release
* October 01, 2010
** First public OpenCL miner released
* October 04, 2010
** Original Bitcoin History wiki page (this page) established (ooh so meta) on Bitcoin.org's wiki.
* October 28, 2010
** First bitcoin short sale transaction initiated, with a loan of 100 BTC by nanotube to kiba, facilitated by the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* November 6, 2010
** The [http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1672 Bitcoin economy passed US $1 million]. The MtGox price touched USD $0.50.
* December 7, 2010
** Bitcoind was ported to the Nokia N900 phone by doublec. The following day, ribuck sent him 0.42 BTC in the first phone-to-phone Bitcoin transaction.
* December 9, 2010
** The generation difficulty passed 10,000.
** First bitcoin call option contract sold, from nanotube to sgornick, via the [[Bitcoin-otc|#bitcoin-otc]] market.
* December 16, 2010
** [http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ Bitcoin Pooled Mining], operated by slush, found its first block
* January 8, 2011
** [[History of Bitcoin]] page (this page) created after replicating from original Bitcoin History page on Bitcoin.org.
** Bitcoin Pooled Mining reached a total of 10,000 Mhash/s

{{fromold|bitcoin_history}}