About four years ago I was on a trip to San Francisco to visit Singularity University and remember one of the lecturers talking about how disruptive exponential change all follow the same pattern: gradually, gradually, and then, suddenly!
Nothing could be more true for Bitcoin hitting $1,000,000,000 market cap today.
In less than one year we have seen Bitcoin go from $9,000 to $54,475; we’ve seen NASDAQ listed institutions like MicroStrategy, Square, and Tesla begin to add Bitcoin to their balance sheets, and we’ve seen the narrative of Bitcoin as a store of value and hedge against inflation begin to firmly take hold.
Seeing this play out in realtime has been truly remarkable to watch.
For any newcomer, I can see how this pace of change seems crazy, but for anyone who has been following this story for the past while, this is anything but sudden. Let’s recap on some of the major milestones that happened in order for Bitcoin to get to $1T.
18 August 2008: Bitcoin.org domain is registered
31 October 2008: Link to a paper by ‘Satoshi Nakomoto’ titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash system was posted to a cryptography mailing list
3 January 2009: The bitcoin network came into existence with the mining of the first genesis block
22 May 2010: Laszlo Hanyecz buys two Pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins signifying the first “price” for a bitcoin in the market
June 2011: WikiLeaks starts accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment
September 2012: The Bitcoin Foundation launches
February 2013: Coinbase sells $1m worth of bitcoin for the first time in a single month
February 2014: Mt. Gox suspends withdrawals citing technical issues while 744,000 bitcoins had been stolen, sending the price tumbling
December 2014: Microsoft starts to accept bitcoin for payment of its Xbox games
Jan 2015: Coinbase raises $74m
February 2015: Number of merchants accepting bitcoin reaches 100,000
March 2016: Bidorbuy starts to accept bitcoin payments
August 2016: Major exchange Bitfinex gets hacked and nearly 120,000BTC stolen
August 2017: After much controversy, the bitcoin network splits into two derivative digital currencies, the bitcoin (BTC) chain with 1 MB blocksize limit and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) chain with 8 MB block size
December 2017: Steem stops supporting payment in bitcoin due to slow transaction speeds, price volatility and high transaction fees
January 2018: South Korea bans anonymous trading of bitcoins and Stripe stops accepting bitcoin as a form of payment citing declining demand and high fees
All of 2019: the great bitcoin winter continues and nobody thinks anything is happening in the world of bitcoin
During that time bitcoin was written off multiple times and yet today, we see its value continue to climb and critics continue to doubt its future.
It took 9 years for bitcoin to reach $10,000 (gradually), 10 years to reach $19,000 (gradually), 12 years to reach $20,000 (gradually) and (then suddenly) 1 year to breach $50,000.
Happy $1T bitcoin.