For the long-time Bitcoin (BTC) fans, it seems like yesterday when they first saw the crypto’s name crop up on the internet. On May 18, 2010, a Florida-based programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz posted on the Bitcointalk.org forum that he wanted to buy two large pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. Jeremy Sturdivant, who was 19 at the time, accepted the offer.
He purchased and delivered two pizzas to Hanyecz’s Florida home on May 22, 2010. Today, Hanyecz greatly regrets giving away so many bitcoins for just a couple of pizzas. If he had them with him today, they would have been roughly worth $168,681,000…
Bitcoin’s run began with the famous and mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto mining the first bitcoin block on January 3, 2009. Nakamoto was rewarded 50 BTCs for the genesis block. However, this reward could not be spent as Nakamoto did not send the transaction to the global transaction database from the genesis block. Many still wonder whether this was an intentional move.
In October 2009, Martti Malmi, a Finnish computer science student, made the very first bitcoin transaction. He had sold 5,050 BTCs, which gave each token a value of $0.0009. In February 2011, the cryptocurrency was valued at $1. Bitcoin price increased 30 times shortly afterwards and crossed $1,000 per token in 2013.
Of course, this pales compared to its all-time high of just under $69,000 in 2021. Bitcoin has turned 14, but its awareness and adoption continue to grow. One is also reminded of the first Bitcoin ATM in the world, which was launched in 2013.
During its 14-year journey, Bitcoin has encountered many obstacles. The BTC price also fell considerably on several occasions, yet it was able to recover and soar higher. This shows that this crypto will not fade away anytime soon.