Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency , a digital asset that uses cryptography to control its creation and management rather than relying on central authorities. The history of bitcoin started with its invention and implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto , who integrated many existing ideas from the cryptography community.
Over the course of bitcoin's history, it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant store of value both on- and offline.
From the mids, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies. Prior to the release of bitcoin, there were a number of digital cash technologies, starting with the issuer-based ecash protocols of David Chaum and Stefan Brands. The idea was independently rediscovered by Adam Back who developed hashcash , a proof-of-work scheme for spam control in In the bit gold proposal which proposed a collectible market-based mechanism for inflation control, Nick Szabo also investigated some additional aspects including a Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement protocol based on quorum addresses to store and transfer the chained proof-of-work solutions, which was vulnerable to Sybil attacks, though.
On the 18th of August , the domain name bitcoin. The text refers to a headline in The Times published on 3 January The first open source bitcoin client was released on 9 January , hosted at SourceForge. One of the first supporters, adopters, contributors to bitcoin and receiver of the first bitcoin transaction was programmer Hal Finney. Finney downloaded the bitcoin software the day it was released, and received 10 bitcoins from Nakamoto in the world's first bitcoin transaction on 12 January block In the early days, Nakamoto is estimated to have mined 1 million bitcoins.
Nakamoto was responsible for creating the majority of the official bitcoin software and was active in making modifications and posting technical information on the bitcoin forum. Fast Company' s investigation brought up circumstantial evidence linking an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry on 15 August , and the bitcoin. The patent application contained networking and encryption technologies similar to bitcoin's, and textual analysis revealed that the phrase " The two researchers based their suspicion on an analysis of the network of bitcoin transactions.
