The price of leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) continues to hit new all-time highs, breaking several records since the 2024 presidential election.
Investors who bought earlier this year or ahead of the election have generated strong profits, but nowhere near the gains that investors got being early believers in the cryptocurrency.
What Happened: In October 2008, pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published a whitepaper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” The whitepaper provided many key details and explained why Bitcoin was created.
In January 2009, Nakamoto mined the genesis block of the first 50 Bitcoins and the cryptocurrency was officially born.
When Bitcoin was released, there were only two ways to get the cryptocurrency: mine the Bitcoin yourself or use a peer-to-peer transaction.
Bitcointalk, a forum created by Nakamoto to host discussions on Bitcoin, was used for several transactions. The transactions were deemed risky at the time because they required trust from both parties and were mostly anonymous.
In October 2009, one of the first-ever recognized Bitcoin transactions happened when a Finnish computer science student sold 5,050 Bitcoin for $5.02 (which represented a value of $0.0009 for each Bitcoin), according to Forbes. The transaction took place on PayPal.
Less than …
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