On January 3, 2009, a person or group of persons under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto launched the Bitcoin mainnet, mining a genesis block with 50 BTC.
Its hash contains the title of the article "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" from the British edition of The Times.
The launch of the network was preceded by the publication of the Bitcoin whitepaper (October 31, 2008). The first transaction took place on January 12, 2009: Satoshi Nakamoto sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney. Three days before that, version 0.1 of the Bitcoin software was released.
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Nakamoto's identity and the motives behind the creation of BTC remain a mystery that the crypto community is trying to unravel.
It is possible that one of the incentives for the creation of Bitcoin was the global financial crisis that erupted in 2007-2008, accompanied by the collapse of the largest investment banks, the widespread drop in production volumes, falling demand and commodity prices, rising unemployment and active government intervention in the economy.
In November 2021, the reference cryptocurrency peaked at around $69,000. At the same time, miners mined 90% of the coins in the total Bitcoin supply.
Today, BTC is trading at around $47,000 and the crypto's capitalization stands at $891.8 billion.