Category:History

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Two fantastic compilations of Bitcoin history are available at the HistoryOfBitcoin.org and igotbitcoin.com/milestones sites.

Some historical events related to digital currencies predating the Bitcoin project

1913

December 23	The Federal Reserve Act[1]

1933

April 5	Executive Order 6102[2], "Confiscation of gold", signed. Later, the United States went off the gold standard. Reversed in 1974.

1936

Feburary	Keynesian economic theory[3] developed

1976

	Diffie and Hellman discover asymmetric public key cryptography[4].

1983

	David Chaum develops idea of e-cash[5].

1992

	Cypherpunk movement and mailing list[6] started.

1993

January 17	Hal Finney predicts NFTs[7].

1995

	David Chaum implements Digicash[8].

1996

June 18	NSA publishes "Anonymous Electronic Cash"[9].

1997

	Tim May proposes crypto based on remailers[10].
May	Adam Back proposes HashCash[11]. implemented in 2001.

1998

May	Wei Dei starts b-money[12].

1999

	Liberty dollar starts[13]. Its office was raided in 2007Your Liberty Dollar Raid Update and it shut down soon after.
	Milton Friedman predicts e-currencies[14].

2000

May	Paypal as we know it today is founded[15].

2001

	Pecunix, an Panamaian e-currency based on gold reserves, is created[16].

2002

	John Nash publishes the paper "Ideal Money"[17].
Feburary 10	First mention of "The Digital Monetary Trust"[18].
December 9	"X" publishes on digital peer to peer currency in UK finance group[19].

Important milestones of the Bitcoin project

2008

August 18	Domain name "bitcoin.org" registered[20].
October 31	Bitcoin whitepaper published
November 09	Bitcoin project registered at SourceForge.net

2009

January 3	Genesis block established at 18:15:05 GMT
January 9	Bitcoin v0.1 released and announced on the cryptography mailing list. Hal Finney tweets "Running bitcoin" the following day.[21]
January 12	First Bitcoin transaction, in block 170 - from Satoshi to Hal Finney[22].
March 8	Bitcoin Wikipedia page created[23]
May 8	Announcement of Bitcoin on Reddit[24]
October 5	Exchange rates published by New Liberty Standard. $1 = 1,309.03 BTC (and theymos thought NLS was overcharging[25])
October 9	#bitcoin-dev channel registered on freenode IRC.
December 16	Bitcoin v0.2 released
December 30	First difficulty increase at 06:11:04 GMT

2010

February 6	Bitcoin Market established
May 22	laszlo first to buy pizza with Bitcoins agreeing upon paying 10,000 BTC for ~$25 worth of pizza courtesy of jercos[26]
July 7	Bitcoin v0.3 released
July 11	Bitcoin v0.3 release mentioned on slashdot[27], bringing a large influx of new bitcoin users.
July 12	Beginning of a 10x increase in exchange value over a 5 day period, from about $0.008/BTC to $0.08/BTC
July 17	MtGox established
July 18	ArtForz generated his first block after establishing his personal OpenCL GPU hash farm
August 15	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	jgarzik offered 10,000 BTC (valued at ~$600-650) to puddinpop to open source their windows-based CUDA client
September 14	Block 79,764 is first to be mined using split allocation of the generation reward.
September 18	puddinpop released source to their windows-based CUDA client under MIT license
September 29	kermit discovered a microtransactions exploit which precipitated the Bitcoin v0.3.13 release
October 01	First public OpenCL miner released
October 04	Original Bitcoin History wiki page (this page) established (ooh so meta) on Bitcoin.org's wiki.
October 07	Exchange rate started climbing up from $0.06/BTC after several flat months.
October 16	First recorded escrowed bitcoin trade conducted, between nanotube and Diablo-D3, escrowed by theymos.
October 17	#bitcoin-otc trading channel established on freenode IRC.
October 28	First bitcoin short sale transaction initiated, with a loan of 100 BTC by nanotube to kiba, facilitated by the #bitcoin-otc market.
November 6	The Bitcoin economy passed US $1 million. The MtGox price touched USD $0.50/BTC.
December 7	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	The generation difficulty passed 10,000.
	First bitcoin call option contract sold, from nanotube to sgornick, via the #bitcoin-otc market.
December 16	Bitcoin Pooled Mining, operated by slush, found its first block

2011

January 2	Tonal Bitcoin units standardized.
January 8	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	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[28]
January 28	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	Bitcoin reached parity with the US dollar, touching $1 per BTC at MtGox.
February 10	Bitcoin.org website struggles to handle traffic resulting from mentions on Slashdot[29], Hacker News and Twitter following the news that parity had been reached.
February 14	A vehicle was, for the first time, offered in exchange for a certain number of bitcoins[30].
March 1	MagicalTux buys mtgox.com from its founder Jed McCaleb
March 6	Total Bitcoin network computation speed for a short time reached a new 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	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 22	WeUseCoins releases the viral video What Is Bitcoin? which has had more than 6.4 million views.
March 25	Difficulty decreased nearly 10%. A decrease has only occurred once before, and this decrease of nearly 10% was the largest.
March 27	The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the British Pound Sterling BTC/GBP, Britcoin, opens.
March 31	The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from Brazilian Reals, Bitcoin Brazil, opens.
April 5	The first market for exchanging bitcoins to and from the Polish złoty, BitMarket.eu, opens.
April 12	First bitcoin put option contract sold via the #bitcoin-otc market.
April 16	TIME does an article on Bitcoin.
April 23	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	VirWoX opens first market to trade bitcoins against a virtual currency on BTC/SL (Second Life Lindens) exchange.
April 30	The generation difficulty passed 100,000.
June 2	The exchange rate at MtGox touched 10 USD per BTC.
June 3	Tonal Bitcoin reached parity with the US cent, touching 1¢ per TBC at Bitcoin Market.
June 8	The MtGox exchange rate peaked at 31.91 USD, at a "market capitalization" of about $206 M [3].
June 12	The MtGox exchange rate briefly dropped to near 10 USD four days after the peak, in its largest percentage price retreat to date.
June 13	Forum user allinvain claimed to have had 25,000 BTC stolen from his Bitcoin wallet (approx. USD equivalent $375,000).
June 19	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 overly simple to brute force passwords.
June 19	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	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	The EFF announced that it was no longer accepting Bitcoin donations due to legal uncertainties.
June 24	The generation difficulty passed 1,000,000 with Block 133056.
July 19	"Let it go on record that at 4:05pm CET [19 July 2011], my manager Tadek was the first person in the world to receive [testnet] Bitcoins via NFC ;)" - Mike Hearn
July 22	BitCoins Mobile, the first Bitcoin application for iPad was released by Intervex Digital.
July 26	Room77 becomes the first brick-and-mortar business (bar) to accept Bitcoin as a means of payment.
July 30	Tribute to Len Sassaman included in the blockchain[31].
August 20	First Bitcoin Conference and World Expo held, in NYC.[32]
August 23	P2Pool, the first P2P decentralized pool, mines its first Bitcoin mainnet block (Block 142,312).
August 30	Difficulty adjustment at block 143,136 marks the first back-to-back drop.
November 15	First CVE (CVE-2011-4447) assigned to a Bitcoin client exploit.
November 25	First European Bitcoin Conference in Prague, Czech Rep.[33]
December 12	Largest amount of fees, to-date, in a single transaction, and most fees in a single block. A transaction paid 171 BTC in fees in block 157235[34].

2012

March 1	Largest theft of bitcoins to-date occurred (near 50K BTC) after security breach at web host Linode.
April 1	Pay-to-script-hash (P2SH) as defined through BIP 0016 goes live.
May 08	A single service, Satoshi Dice becomes responsible for over half the transaction volume on the Bitcoin blockchain.
June 3	Largest block (most transactions), to-date (June 3), is block 181919 with 1322 transactions[35].
July 22	One millionth topic reply was posted on the unofficial Bitcoin Forum [36].
September 15-16	Bitcoin Conference in London [37].
September 27	Formation of the Bitcoin Foundation.
November 28	Halving day. Block 210,000 is the first with a block reward subsidy of only 25 BTC.
December 6	First Bitcoin exchange licensed "as a bank" in europe (actually a PSP which is like a bank, without debt-money issuing).

2013

February 19	Bitcoin Client v0.8 released featuring improved download speed and Bloom Filtering
February 28	The MtGox exchange rate broke the June 8 2011 peak of 31.91 USD. The first all time high since 601 days
March 12	A previously undiscovered protocol rule results in a hard fork of the 0.8.0 reference client.
March 18	The United States federal agency charged with enforcing laws against money laundering (FinCEN) declares that Bitcoin users are subject to regulation only at the point of USD-BTC exchange.[38]
March 28	Total Bitcoin market cap passes $1 billion. [39]
April 1	Bitcoin price breaks 100 USD on MtGox and other major exchanges.

2014

2015

2016

2017

May 3	Tonal Bitcoin reached parity with the US dollar, touching $1 per TBC for the first time.

See Also

• Bitcoin Firsts
• Press
• Bitcoin Price Chart with Historic Events

References