The timeline
The moments that made Bitcoin
33 pivotal events, in order. Prefer it interactive? Watch the timeline →
Phil Zimmermann releases PGP
Pretty Good Privacy put strong, free email encryption in the hands of ordinary people for the first time — and triggered a years-long U.S. criminal investigation of its author.
The Cypherpunks mailing list is founded
Tim May, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore start the Cypherpunks mailing list, where privacy, anonymity and digital cash would be debated for over a decade.
Adam Back proposes Hashcash
Hashcash introduced a proof-of-work cost function to deter email spam, requiring senders to burn a little computation per message.
Wei Dai proposes b-money
b-money described anonymous distributed electronic cash maintained by a collective of bookkeepers rewarded for computational work — money created by solving problems.
bitcoin.org registered
The domain bitcoin.org was registered anonymously through anonymousspeech.com, the first public footprint of the project — over two months before the white paper appeared.
Lehman Brothers collapses
Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the peak of the 2008 global financial crisis and the wave of bank bailouts that followed.
The Bitcoin white paper is published
Satoshi Nakamoto emailed "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" to the metzdowd cryptography mailing list: "I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party."
The Bitcoin project is registered on SourceForge
Days after the white paper, the Bitcoin project was registered on SourceForge, where the first open-source releases would be hosted.
Bitcoin's code is reviewed before launch
Satoshi shared the source privately for review: Ray Dillinger audited the blockchain, Hal Finney the scripting language, and both checked the accounting — among the only people to vet Bitcoin before it went live.
The genesis block is mined
Satoshi mined block 0, embedding the headline "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." The Bitcoin network came into existence.
Bitcoin v0.1 is released
Satoshi announced the first release of the Bitcoin software on the cryptography mailing list. It ran on Windows and included the wallet, miner, and peer-to-peer node in one program.
First Bitcoin transaction: Satoshi → Hal Finney
In block 170, Satoshi sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney — the first time bitcoins moved between two people.
First exchange rate established
New Liberty Standard published a first Bitcoin/USD rate based on the cost of the electricity used to mine: 1 USD = 1,309.03 BTC.
The Bitcointalk forum is founded
Satoshi launched the discussion forum (later bitcointalk.org) that became the primary gathering place for the early Bitcoin community.
Bitcoin Market opens — the first exchange
A user known as dwdollar launched Bitcoin Market, the first platform where people could buy and sell bitcoin for dollars with each other rather than guessing a rate.
Bitcoin Pizza Day
Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas, arranged through the forum — the first real-world purchase of goods with Bitcoin.
Gavin Andresen launches the Bitcoin Faucet
Gavin Andresen built a website that gave away 5 BTC to anyone who asked, to get coins into people's hands and grow the network.
Bitcoin hits the Slashdot front page
A Slashdot story about the v0.3 release brought a wave of new users to the forum and the network, the first major mainstream-tech exposure.
Mt. Gox launches as a Bitcoin exchange
Jed McCaleb relaunched the Mt. Gox domain as a Bitcoin exchange, giving the market a central venue to trade BTC for dollars.
GPU mining begins — the arms race starts
ArtForz brought the first GPU mining farm online, using private OpenCL code to win blocks far faster than any CPU. By his own account he mined ~1,700 BTC in six days; within weeks GPU miners dominated the network.
The value overflow incident
A bug let someone create a transaction in block 74638 generating 184.467 billion BTC. Satoshi and others released a patched client within hours and the chain was forked to erase it.
The first mining pool launches
Marek "Slush" Palatinus launched Bitcoin.cz — the "Bitcoin Pooled Mining Server," later Slush Pool — the first pool to let small miners combine hash power and share block rewards proportionally.
“WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest”
As donors looked to fund WikiLeaks with Bitcoin after a banking blockade, Satoshi urged restraint: "It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us." It was his penultimate public post.
Satoshi's last public forum post
Satoshi made a final public post on Bitcointalk about a minor denial-of-service fix, then withdrew from public communication.
Silk Road launches
Ross Ulbricht launched Silk Road, a darknet marketplace that used Bitcoin for payments and Tor for anonymity — Bitcoin's first true "killer app."
Bitcoin reaches parity with the US dollar
On the MtGox market, 1 BTC traded at 1 USD for the first time.
"I've moved on to other things"
In a final email to developers, Satoshi wrote that he had "moved on to other things," that Bitcoin was "in good hands with Gavin and everyone," and handed off the alert key.
The Bitcoin Foundation is founded
Gavin Andresen, Charlie Shrem and others formed the Bitcoin Foundation to fund core development and represent Bitcoin publicly — the first attempt at an institution around a leaderless project.
The FBI shuts down Silk Road
Ross Ulbricht was arrested and Silk Road seized. The government later auctioned the recovered bitcoin, and the price barely flinched.
Bitcoin crosses $1,000 for the first time
Driven by surging interest, the price of one bitcoin passed $1,000 — a roughly 100,000× move from the first 2009 exchange rate.
Mt. Gox collapses
Mt. Gox, long the dominant exchange, halted withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy, having lost roughly 850,000 BTC. It was the largest catastrophe of Bitcoin's early era.
Newsweek names the wrong Satoshi
Newsweek published a cover story claiming Dorian Nakamoto was Bitcoin's creator. He denied it, the community rejected it, and the real Satoshi's account briefly stirred to post: "I am not Dorian Nakamoto."
Hal Finney dies
Hal Finney — the first person to run Bitcoin besides Satoshi and the recipient of the first transaction — died of ALS and was cryonically preserved, as he had planned.