Back to the Future: A History of Crypto

Introduction

Surely, we know that in the earliest time goods, using to daily living, were considered money (e.g. cows and sheep). Then the progress of society brought the need to track money across large territories of land which resulted the appearing of paper and coin money, issued from the ruling governments. According to near past, invention called the world wide web, made it possible for people to buy and sell virtually anything to anyone around the world. Also, the preferred approach  for these internet transactions was bank-issued credit cards. That`s why now we have a new form of digital money — cryptocurrency. However, once upon a time Nelson Mandela said, “Money won’t create success, the freedom to make it will.” So, let`s talk about a history of a bitcoin, the major crypto. How it works and how you can get involved.

The history of bitcoin

To begin with, bitcoin began the first cryptocurrency in the world. An anonymous person or group, known as Satoshi Nakamoto, published a document in an online cryptography forum in November 2008. First of all, he lunched the first details of a history of this crypto: how bitcoin would work, describing it as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It allows any two people to send money to each other for free, no matter where they are in the world. It is a borderless currency. The main benefit of bitcoin is that it doesn`t require any centralized authority or institution to operate. This is an antagonist of centralized financial systems which depend on the existence of a central bank or government.

Blockchain

The goal of the document was to describe how different parts of the bitcoin protocol would operate and be keep secure. A new type of database was named a blockchain. It would keep track of a single history of all bitcoin transactions and would be maintained by everyone in the network. The database would be publicly available for anyone to view and inspect and anyone can download a copy of this database. This provides data redundancy and makes sure the data is never lost but, also, provides the way to verify the transactions.

It is next growing list digital entry in blocks which are linked and secured using cryptography. These digitally recorded data blocks are stored in a linear chain. Each block in the chain contains information (e.g. bitcoin transaction). The hash for a block is calculated using the transactions inside of it as well as the previous block’s hash. Block is calculated using proof-of-work. Proof of work (PoW) in the cryptocurrency world is an important way to validate coin transaction status and asset management. PoW is used to generate new blocks for the database, also known as mining, and the reward for mining a new block is given to the miner by creating new Bitcoins in the system. This is the only way new bitcoins can be created.

Further events

Moreover, bitcoin had been synonymous with cryptocurrency, because it was the only cryptocurrency.

So, until 2011, other competitors appeared, such as litecoin. These alternative coins often called Forks of the bitcoin, using its open source code. Also, presently thousands of cryptocurrencies appeared but bitcoin remains by far the leading one in terms of recognition and market. From 2012 brought about major growth for cryptocurrency coupled with significant setbacks but bitcoin began to be followed by other major retailers such as Microsoft, overstock.com, and PayPal. Moreover, this was the first step towards cryptocurrency becoming widely accepted internationally as a legitimate payment method. in total during this period an estimated thousand merchants accepted Bitcoin.

To sum up, a history of crypto looks like the internet in 1994. It means, few people used it, and even fewer knew how it worked, but it would go on to revolutionize nearly every industry in the world. In conclusion, digital currencies lead to revolutionize money. Above all, bitcoin is such a versatile software that hundreds of copycat spinoffs have already been created.