Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency star, has entered the financial world in a frantic struggle, as major global technology companies - led by Tesla, with a historic purchase of $ 1.5 billion last February - are rushing to snatch this "digital gold." " the new.
The French newspaper Le Figaro said that in one year, this pioneering cryptocurrency witnessed a 10-fold increase in its value to reach imaginary levels, as it now reached about 60 thousand dollars per bitcoin, prompting some to consider this digital asset as the currency of the future that it can someday To replace the euro or the dollar.
Beginnings
The newspaper affirms that the Bitcoin story did not start from scratch as its roots go back to the nineties of the last century with the emergence of the "Sypherpunks" movement, against internet censorship through encryption, as Bitcoin relies on a set of technologies developed by IT professionals from this movement on It ranges from 20 to 30 years, according to Baptist Lake, founder of a cryptocurrency exchange.
On October 31, 2008, a mysterious figure named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a message in a specialized mailing list announcing that she was creating a digital currency far from any authority or control, calling on developers who wanted to do so to help her in her project.
And then in January 2009 the first block of the currency was created, which at that time only aroused the interest of some programming specialists, most of them Americans, and then came the launch of the first estimate of the currency in October of the same year, when the value of the currency was then $ 0.001. This is the same amount as the electricity they cost.
The moment that marked a defining moment in Bitcoin's history was in 2017 (Shutterstock)
The first purchase
On May 22, 2010, the first purchase of a real asset took place using Bitcoin. On that day, an American developer named Lazlo Hanyecz bought two pizza pieces for 10,000 bitcoins (about $ 28 billion now) and since then, digital currency enthusiasts celebrate this day. Annually, under the name "Bitcoin Pizza Day," a celebration of the most expensive pizza in human history.
Rapidly, the first exchange platforms appeared, such as Coinbase in 2011 and Kraken in 2012, and the equation of Bitcoin against the dollar was reached in February 2011, and in the middle of the same year the price reached $ 30. .
But Bitcoin did not begin its career as a real currency - according to Le Figaro - except in the "dark internet" - which is a parallel Internet in which everything is bought in complete secrecy without the need to reveal an identity - which earned it a bad reputation in the beginning.
The early days of the cryptocurrency were also full of major scandals, such as the scandal of hacking into the platform "MT GOX" - a Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange - in which about 700,000 went unheeded.
The defining moment
But the moment that really constituted a defining moment in the history of the currency was the year 2017, when an unusual fever swept the markets, and many rushed to acquire this digital symbol, so the price of Bitcoin moved within a few months from $ 3,500 to nearly 20,000, and on some days the price jumped A thousand dollars in one go.
However, the financial world has not yet given its confidence to the emerging digital currency, and one of the big companies' officials described it as a fraud only that will collapse quickly from the inside, which was almost certainly confirmed, as the currency witnessed a collapse at the end of 2017, which led to an atmosphere of panic in the markets.
Within a few months, the price fell again to $ 3,000, but in 2019 Facebook's announcement of creating its own digital currency, Libra, pushed the price up again, rising to nearly $ 10,000, which is The project that Facebook eventually abandoned, under pressure from the US Central Bank.
But the unexpected push that revived the digital currency came from the shock left by the Corona epidemic, as the founding investors (banks, insurance companies, and others) - in a context in which central banks flooded markets with cash - saw Bitcoin as an impregnable wall in the face of the decline in the value of traditional currencies.
It is noteworthy that Bitcoin continued its decline for the fifth consecutive day, to approach in today's trading more than the level of 50 thousand dollars per unit.
The drop in the largest digital currency by market value comes amid expectations that the recent stimulus operations in the United States will be spent in the real economy instead of financial markets and asset purchases.
The value of Bitcoin fell over the course of this week by about 10%, marking the longest streak of decline since last December.