Former presidential media aide and YouTuber, Reno Omokiri is receiving heat across Nigeria Twitter community over false YouTube video claim that Bitcoin was launched in 2013.
In one of his videos on YouTube, Reno claimed that Bitcoin was invented in 2013. This has elicited backlash from people on twitter who berates Reno for feeding his followers with inaccurate information.
Bitcoin was created out of the turmoil of the 2008 Great Recession as distrust of banks and their role in the financial system grew. An individual or a group of people going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto issued a white paper to address the centralized control of money and the trust required in handling citizens’ cash.
In the traditional financial system, transactions can be reversed or meddled with by third parties, and transaction costs can add up. Bitcoin was presented as a way to transact without using a third party. Rather, the Bitcoin system uses cryptographic proof to maintain the integrity of the network instead of relying on third-party banks and other institutions.null
On Jan. 3, 2009, the blockchain was launched when the first block, called the genesis block, was mined. The first test transaction took place about one week later.
“For the first few months of its existence, it was obtainable only by miners validating the Bitcoin blockchain,” says Chetan Chawla, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, who researches cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
At this point, Bitcoin had no real monetary value, says Mark Grabowski, an associate professor at Adelphi University who teaches a course on Bitcoin and is the author of “Cryptocurrencies: A Primer on Digital Money.” Miners – who use powerful computers that solve complex math problems to uncover new Bitcoins and verify that previous Bitcoin transactions are legitimate and accurate – would trade Bitcoin back and forth just for fun.
It would take more than a year for the first economic transaction to take place, when a Florida man negotiated to have two Papa John’s pizzas, valued at $25, delivered for 10,000 BTC on May 22, 2010. “That transaction essentially established the initial real-world price or value of Bitcoin at 4 Bitcoins per penny,” Grabowski says.
Fast forward to today, and that amount of Bitcoin has a value of nearly $400 million. In honor of this pivotal moment, cryptocurrency fans and supporters call May 22 Pizza Day.
“In the early days, the first transactions with Bitcoin were negotiated on internet forums with people bartering for goods and services in exchange for Bitcoin,” says Garrette Furo, partner at Wilshire Phoenix, a New York-based investment management firm. “The value of Bitcoin was originally arbitrary.”
Then, in 2011, miners and coders started to build other networks, like Ethereum and Litecoin, and began to improve the code behind Bitcoin’s blockchain, adapting it for different uses.
Once Bitcoin became available on exchanges in 2010, it became easier to buy, sell, trade and store. Thanks to these exchanges, Bitcoin has a reliable price against the U.S. dollar. It even has been officially adopted as legal tender in El Salvador alongside the dollar.
In February 2011, Bitcoin’s price crossed the $1 threshold. “For its first few years as it grew, its price was under $2,” says Kris Marszalek, CEO of Crypto.com. “In June 2011, it hit its first bubble, rocketing to around $31 before sinking back down to the single-digit range.”null
Almost two years later, in April 2013, Bitcoin reached $200. By the end of November the same year, it was worth more than $1,000. It then rose to $10,000 in November 2017 and all the way up to its maximum price near $68,990 in November 2021. That’s not to say it was a smooth ride.
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