On January 3, 2009, the Genesis block, or the first block in the Bitcoin blockchain, was created. In the coinbase parameter, there was a simple message: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” From that one block, Bitcoin was born. Bitcoin has come a long way from that initial statement by Bitcoin’s pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. The technology is growing up and changing from its early days as a project adopted by impassioned technologists and libertarians to a technology widely researched and used by financial institutions worldwide. Bitcoin had a rough road ahead of it, as did many early technologies including the Internet. It dealt with newspaper headlines lambasting Bitcoin because of its connection to Silk Road and drugs. Early adopters suffered millions of dollars in losses when early exchange Mt.Gox imploded. “Bitcoin is Dead,” many prophesied. And yet, as Bitcoin approaches its seventh birthday, we see things changing. It is turning into that curious, wide-eyed technology with ideas as widespread as any normal 7-year-old. Cross-border payments, machine-to-machine transactions, smart contracts, microtransactions, and stock settlements all have been discussed and developed. Nothing is off limits; no question goes unasked. From the early days of mining using a laptop computer, now bitcoin miners are setting up industrial-sized data centers with hundreds of thousands of high-powered, specialized machines. In January 2014, the Bitcoin network hashrate was only 10 million GH/s. Now it is 504 million GH/s. And as new mining machines are built and sold, the hashrate has continued to increase. During same time frame, there were around 50,000 bitcoin transactions daily. That measure of network utility has increased to about 170,000 bitcoin transactions daily. A big part of this growth in transactions is linked to the growth in bitcoin-accepting merchants. In mid-2014, there were approximately 65,000 […]
