Category:History

• August 18, 2008
  • Domain name "bitcoin.org" registered.
• October 31, 2008
  • 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 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 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 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 offered 10,000 BTC (valued at ~$600-650) to puddinpop to open source their windows-based CUDA client
• September 18, 2010
  • puddinpop released source to their windows-based CUDA client under MIT license
• September 29, 2010
  • kermit 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 kiba, facilitated by the #bitcoin-otc market.
• November 6, 2010
  • The 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 sgornick, via the #bitcoin-otc market.
• December 16, 2010
  • 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 at the rate of 4 BTC for each of the one-hundred trillion dollar ($100,000,000,000,000) Zimbabwe notes^[1]
• 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 traffic resulting from mentions on Slashdot^[2], 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^[3].
• March 6, 2011
  • Total Bitcoin network computation speed for a short time 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 (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 market.
• April 16, 2011
  • TIME does 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 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 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 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 133056.

References