Happy Birthday, Bitcoin!

The first block of the Bitcoin blockchain, known as the genesis block, was mined exactly 13 years ago on January 3, 2009. Since then, over 700 000 Bitcoin blocks have been mined and Bitcoin has transformed from “magic internet money” into not only a financial asset that big monetary institutions want to get their hands on, but also a legal tender of a country now!

Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, brought the Bitcoin network to life at 18:15 UTC on January 3, 2009. Two months before, on October 31, 2008, Nakamoto had published the Bitcoin White Paper to a cryptography mailing list.

Backed and secured by mathematics, cryptography and blockchain technology, Bitcoin is a scarce digital asset. There can only ever be 21 million bitcoins in existence and over 90% of the bitcoins that will ever exist have already been mined.

The institutional interest in Bitcoin that we have seen in the last months and years and can certainly expect to see more of it in future, makes it more likely that the bitcoins or fragments of bitcoin (also known as satoshis, or sats) that you have been buying as a small investor through platforms such as LocalBitcoins are going to appreciate in value, as they have been doing during the last decade or so.

2021 ushered in a truly new era for Bitcoin and a new paradigm of money, one challenging existing definitions. Last year, a real-world country, Central American nation, El Salvador, adopted Bitcoin to be its legal tender alongside the US dollar.

Will 2022 bring about more countries embracing bitcoin? Will we see more major companies jumping on the Bitcoin bandwagon? Shall we expect the likes of Apple, Meta, or Samsung to convert some of their assets into the world’s first crypto currency? Or, will there be a central bank buying Bitcoin reserves in 2022? What do you think?