Cryptocurrency timeline:
October 2008:
A White Paper is published by someone called Satoshi Nakamoto describing the concept of Bitcoin.
January 2009:
Satoshi Nakamoto carries out the first transaction over the blockchain by transmitting 10 bitcoin to a developer, Hal Finney.
February 2014:
Mt Gox, a bitcoin exchange based in Tokyo, Japan, with claims to have become the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange – files for bankruptcy and declares it has lost thousands of bitcoins to hackers. Mt. Gox announced that approximately 850,000 bitcoins belonging to customers and the company were missing and likely stolen, an amount valued at more than $450 million at the time. The United States Department of Justice identified Alexander Vinnik, owner of the BTC-e bitcoin exchange, as an alleged key figure in the laundering of Mt. Gox’s stolen bitcoins.
July 2015:
Ethereum is created by Vitalik Buterin as a potential competitor to Bitcoin. Although it exists as a digital currency, the main purpose of the project is to help developers build and run decentralised applications and pay for related services. In 2016, a hacker exploited a flaw in a third-party project called The DAO and stole $50 million of Ether (the currency which trades on the Ethereum platform).
September 2017:
JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon calls Bitcoin a “fraud”. Appearing at the CNBC-Institutional Investor Delivering Alpha conference, Dimon said at the time: “It’s worse than tulip bulbs. It won’t end well. Someone is going to get killed.” He also contended, “It’s just not a real thing, eventually it will be closed.”
November 2017:
The Winkelwoss twins (of Facebook fame) become Bitcoin’s first billionaires. The Winkelwees claim to have invested $11 million of their $65 million payout from their lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook to invest in Bitcoin in 2013.
December 2017:
Bitcoin reaches its then peak price of $20,000.
May 2018:
Legendary investor Warren Buffet cautions investors not to buy Bitcoin, famously saying “bitcoin is probably rat poison squared“. Microsoft co-founder and current philanthropist Bill Gates said “I would short Bitcoin if I could“.
December 2018:
Bitcoin’s price drops to $3,300 after retail investors and traders lose interest in the asset class.
December 2019:
Bitcoin’s closes the year 2019 with a price of $7,300.
November 2020:
Nouriel Roubini, NYU’s Stern School of Business who made a name for himself predicting the 2008 financial crisis, tweets “Bitcoin has no role in institutional or retail investors portfolios. It is not a currency: not an unit of account, not a scalable means of payment & is a highly volatile store of value. It is heavily manipulated: look at the investigation of Bitfinex by US law enforcement.” He follows this up a month later by stating “I stand by my views: the higher they bubble, the harder they will fall once the criminal Tether manipulation is crashed & FOMO driven retail/institutional suckers get burned hard as in 2018. The parabolic rise in BTC [Bitcoin] has no fundamentals”.
December 2020:
Bitcoin’s price hits almost $29,000 on December 31, 2020. Coinbase, Bitcoin’s largest trading platform for retail investors in the United States, files for an IPO.
January 2021:
Bitcoin’s price rises to $34,000 on January 5, 2021. JP Morgan, an investment bank, predicts that Bitcoin prices could rise to over $146,000 over the “long term”.
September 2021:
Bitcoin at $42,000 after hitting a high of $64,000 earlier in 2021. The Biden administration threatens to regulate the crypto space. Here come the crypto rules.
Culvem 