Seven years ago Satoshi Nakamoto published his famous whitepaper entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” inviting users on the leading cryptography mailing list to work on it, officially marking the start of Bitcoin’s existence.
On January 3, 2009 18:15:05 UTC, Satoshi Nakamoto generated genesis block or Bitcoin’s first block of blockchain. Modern versions of Bitcoin assign it block number 0, though older versions gave it number 1. The genesis block is almost always hardcoded into the software. It is a special case in that it does not reference a previous block, and for Bitcoin and almost all of its derivatives, it produces an unspendable subsidy.
The value of the first bitcoin transactions were negotiated by individuals on the bitcointalk forums with one notable transaction of 10,000 BTC used to indirectly purchase two pizzas delivered byPapa John’s.
On 6 August 2010, a major vulnerability in the bitcoin protocol was spotted. Transactions weren’t properly verified before they were included in the transaction log or “block chain” which let users bypass bitcoin’s economic restrictions and create an indefinite number of bitcoins.
On 15 August, the vulnerability was exploited; over 184 billion bitcoins were generated in a transaction, and sent to two addresses on the network. Within hours, the transaction was spotted and erased from the transaction log after the bug was fixed and the network forked to an updated version of the bitcoin protocol. This was the only major security flaw found and exploited in bitcoin’s history.
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. Adam Back developed hashcash, a proof-of-work scheme for spam control. The first proposals for distributed digital scarcity basedcryptocurrencies were Wei Dai‘s b-money and Nick Szabo‘s bit gold. Hal Finney developed RPOW. Bit gold, b-money and RPOW all used hashcash as their proof-of-work algorithm.
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