Bitcoin's White Paper Turns 11 as Network Passes Milestones

Happy birthday, bitcoin.

Halloween 2019 marks the eleventh anniversary of the release of the white paper for the first fully decentralized, peer-to-peer electronic cash by anonymous creator(s) Satoshi Nakomoto. In the wake of the Great Recession of 2007–2009, a single email for a small collective of cypherpunks proved to be the catalyst for a monetary revolution.

“I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” Satoshi wrote to open his email, attaching the bitcoin white paper.

Rolling out bitcoin’s code the following January with the mining of the genesis block, bitcoin’s first year was inauspicious at best. Eleven years later, however, most metrics point towards a bright future. The white paper's birthday month proved to be one of the best yet.

Looking at the numbers, the last 10 months have given bitcoin hodlers much to be thankful for; October, even more so.

Bitcoin's price jumped some 40 percent in 24 hours on Oct. 26, briefly breaking out to $10,000. As ARK Invest analyst Yassine Elmandjra wrote on Twitter, the price movement has only happened three times in bitcoin's history.

The previous two times Bitcoin saw a >40% daily gain, it was trading at $0.40 and $5.65.

Today, Bitcoin’s 42% swing is the 3rd largest daily gain in price history.

Data via @coinmetrics pic.twitter.com/PKHQgNlSUy

— Yassine Elmandjra (@yassineARK) October 26, 2019

Bitcoin’s hash rate – a good metric for the amount of energy put towards mining bitcoin’s and securing the network – hit an all-time high at over 110 exahashes per second (EH/s) on Oct. 23.

As recent initial public offering filings for mining giants Canaan and Bitmain show, bitcoin mining has gone a long way since the early days of CPU farming, and is now big business.

Bitcoin also just mined its 18 million coin, leaving a mad scramble for the last 3 million. As halvings continue to occur every 210,000 blocks or so, the last coin won’t be minted till 2140.

Bitcoin fees collected reached $1 billion in total earlier this week too, right in time for today’s celebrations.

Birthday candles image via Shutterstock