Today Bitcoin celebrates its first 10-year anniversary. On January 3, 2009, a person or group of people under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto launched the main network of the first cryptocurrency, mining the genesis block with 50 bitcoins. This marked the beginning of a new history of finance, with the decentralization and globalization of an independent monetary unit. The genesis block contains an encrypted message from the creators: «The Times — Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks». The developers were confident that the cryptocurrency would become a kind of response to the deep financial crisis the whole world was in during 2008 and 2009. After all, cryptocurrencies were meant to be not a lever of pressure, but a simple unit that embodied data storage services in new secure channels. «The design of the system makes it possible to carry out various electronic transactions that do not depend on state and international financial institutions», many publications around the world wrote about Bitcoin, which years later created a sensation and sparked a frenzy.

The block in the new network was mined on January 3. Back then the miner received 50 bitcoins. Now you can earn only 12.5 bitcoin per block. At the same time, in dollar terms this amount has increased significantly. And the first bitcoin transaction took place on January 12, 2009. Back then, 1,000 units were sold for just 30 cents. It was only by 2011 that the price of one bitcoin reached a dollar.

The year 2015 became a turning point in Bitcoin's history, when the European Court classified transactions with this cryptocurrency as payment operations with fiat money. Later, in 2016, Japan legislatively granted bitcoin the status of a means of payment, and in the United States it began to be referred to as a decentralized virtual currency. And Switzerland, as a state that traditionally sets the trends for regulating money circulation around the world, equated Bitcoin with a foreign currency that has the right to circulate within the country.

The peak of bitcoin's popularity came in 2017, when its price rose to a maximum of 20 thousand dollars. But since the beginning of 2018, bitcoin has fallen in price by 73%. And although the hype around bitcoin has subsided over time, experts believe that the Bitcoin era is only beginning — after all, the cryptocurrency laid the foundation for the development of a new technology — the blockchain, which is gradually taking up important positions in the global electronic industry. It is also worth noting that in 2018, the second-layer Lightning Network solution was actively developing on the Bitcoin network. In addition, thanks to the activation of the Segregated Witness protocol and batching, blocks larger than 2 MB began to be mined last year.

10 years ago a new industry emerged in the field of finance. A reliable settlement network made it possible to usher in a fundamentally new era without unnecessary costs, with security and an eye toward the future.