Bitcoin did not appear out of nowhere in 2009. It was the last in a long line of attempts to build digital cash, and its story since then is one of crashes, scandals, and a network that kept producing a block every ten minutes through all of it.
This page tells that story in order, with dates, and marks anything that can still change with when it was checked.
Before bitcoin: the cypherpunks
In the 1990s a loose group of programmers and cryptographers called the cypherpunks argued that privacy online would have to be built with code, not granted by governments. Digital money was one of their goals.
Several projects came close. David Chaum’s DigiCash (1989) offered private electronic payments but relied on a central company, which went bankrupt in 1998. Adam Back’s Hashcash (1997) used computational puzzles to fight email spam, an idea bitcoin later borrowed for mining. Wei Dai’s b-money (1998) and Nick Szabo’s bit gold (proposed around 1998 and 2005) sketched decentralized money with scarce digital tokens, but neither was fully built.
Each solved part of the problem. None solved the hardest part: how to stop someone from spending the same digital coin twice without a central referee.
2008: the whitepaper and Satoshi Nakamoto
On October 31, 2008, in the middle of the global financial crisis, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a nine-page paper to a cryptography mailing list. Its title was “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”
The paper’s answer to the double-spending problem was the blockchain: a public ledger, kept by many computers, in which adding a block costs real computing work, so cheating costs more than playing honestly.
Nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is. The name could belong to one person or a group. Satoshi wrote code and forum posts until late 2010, then stopped, and has not been credibly heard from since.
January 3, 2009: the genesis block
Satoshi mined the first block, called the genesis block, on January 3, 2009. Embedded in it was a headline from that day’s London Times: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
The headline proved the block was not created earlier, and it made a point: bitcoin launched as an alternative to a banking system being rescued with public money.
2010: the first exchanges and Bitcoin Pizza Day
The most expensive pizza in history
On May 22, 2010, a Florida programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoin for two Papa John’s pizzas, arranged through a forum. It is widely counted as the first purchase of a physical good with bitcoin, and May 22 is still celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
That summer, the first real exchanges appeared, letting people trade dollars for bitcoin at a market price. The biggest of them, Mt. Gox, launched in July 2010 and soon handled most of the world’s bitcoin trading.
2011 to 2014: Silk Road and the fall of Mt. Gox
Silk Road, an online black market that ran from 2011 until the FBI shut it down in October 2013, used bitcoin for payments. It gave bitcoin its early reputation as criminal money, and it also showed that the public ledger could be traced: prosecutors followed the coins.
Mt. Gox grew into the dominant exchange and then collapsed. In February 2014 it halted withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy, revealing that roughly 850,000 bitcoin belonging to customers and the company were missing, most of them stolen over years of poor security.
The lesson stuck: an exchange holding your bitcoin is a company that can fail. Repayments to Mt. Gox creditors began in 2024 and, as of late 2025, the deadline for finishing them has been extended to October 2026.
2015 to 2017: the block-size wars
As usage grew, blocks filled up and fees rose. One camp wanted to raise the size limit on each block so more transactions would fit. Another argued that bigger blocks would make running a node too expensive for ordinary people, concentrating control in a few hands.
The argument ran for two years. In August 2017 the network adopted Segregated Witness, or SegWit, an upgrade that fit more transactions into a block without raising the limit and cleared the way for the Lightning Network. The same month, the big-block camp split off to create a separate coin, Bitcoin Cash.
The halvings, explained
A halving is the moment the reward paid to miners for each new block is cut in half. It happens every 210,000 blocks, which works out to roughly every four years, and it is written into the software so that the total supply stops at 21 million.
| Halving | Date | Reward per block after |
|---|---|---|
| First | November 28, 2012 | 25 BTC |
| Second | July 9, 2016 | 12.5 BTC |
| Third | May 11, 2020 | 6.25 BTC |
| Fourth | April 2024 | 3.125 BTC |
The next halving is expected in 2028. Each so far has been followed by a large price rise and then a large fall, though nobody can say whether that will continue.
2017 and 2021: booms and busts
Bitcoin rose from under $1,000 at the start of 2017 to nearly $20,000 that December, then lost more than 80 percent over the following year.
The 2021 cycle was bigger and more institutional: bitcoin passed $60,000 that spring, fell by half, and reached about $69,000 in November 2021 before another long decline, with companies and funds now buying alongside individuals.
2021: El Salvador
On September 7, 2021, El Salvador became the first country to make bitcoin legal tender, meaning businesses were required to accept it alongside the US dollar. The government built a wallet app and bought bitcoin for its treasury.
Adoption stayed limited. In early 2025, as part of a loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund, El Salvador amended the law: accepting bitcoin became voluntary, taxes must be paid in dollars, and the government agreed to stop buying bitcoin with public funds. As of mid-2026 bitcoin keeps a form of official recognition there, but the mandatory experiment is over.
2022: Terra, Celsius, FTX, and why bitcoin kept working
In May 2022 the Terra project’s “stablecoin,” a token meant to hold a one-dollar value through an algorithm rather than real dollars, collapsed to nearly zero. The shock spread to lenders such as Celsius, which had promised high interest on deposits and froze withdrawals in June before filing for bankruptcy.
In November 2022, FTX, then one of the largest exchanges, collapsed within days after it emerged that customer deposits had been secretly lent to its sister trading firm. Its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was convicted of fraud in 2023 and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Through all of this, the Bitcoin network never stopped. Blocks kept arriving every ten minutes and every valid transaction settled. The failures were companies that held people’s coins, not the protocol. FTX’s estate began repaying customers in 2025 and had distributed close to $10 billion by July 2026.
January 2024: spot bitcoin ETFs
On January 10, 2024, the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved the first spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, or ETFs: funds that hold real bitcoin and trade on the stock market like any share. Anyone with a brokerage or retirement account could now get bitcoin exposure without a crypto exchange account.
The funds grew faster than any ETF launch in history. As of September 2026 the US spot bitcoin ETFs together hold roughly 1.2 million bitcoin, worth close to $100 billion, with BlackRock’s IBIT the largest at more than $60 billion.
2025: policy turns, a record, and a crash
Bitcoin crossed $100,000 for the first time in early December 2024. In 2025 US policy shifted sharply: the SEC withdrew guidance that had discouraged banks from holding crypto for customers and dropped most of its enforcement cases against major exchanges.
On March 6, 2025, an executive order created a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, holding the roughly 200,000 bitcoin the government had seized in criminal cases rather than selling them. On July 18, 2025, the GENIUS Act became law, the first federal framework for dollar stablecoins. New Hampshire (May 2025) and Texas (June 2025) passed laws allowing state bitcoin reserves, and Texas later bought a small position through an ETF.
Bitcoin’s price peaked at about $126,000 on October 6, 2025, then fell by roughly half over the next four months as leveraged bets unwound and it traded alongside a broader tech selloff, dipping below $60,000 in February 2026.
2026 so far (checked September 14, 2026)
The 20 millionth bitcoin was mined on March 9, 2026, leaving fewer than one million to be created over the next century.
Mining had a hard year. Network computing power slipped from a late-2025 record to around one zettahash (a thousand exahashes) per second as large miners shifted capital toward AI data centers.
In Washington, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, a bill to define which agency regulates which digital assets, passed the House in July 2025 and cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May 2026. A first Senate floor vote was scheduled for mid-September 2026; as of this writing it has not become law. Proposals to have the Treasury buy bitcoin for the strategic reserve have stalled, with a May 2026 bill instead calling for a study.
Roughly 200 public companies held more than 1.2 million bitcoin by mid-2026, led by Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) with about 845,000. ETF inflows returned in August and early September 2026, and bitcoin was trading in the high $70,000s in mid-September, well below its 2025 peak.
Key point: Every crisis in this story was a company, a market, or a government changing course. The network itself has run without interruption since January 2009. That track record is the reason it is still here.
Next
- What Is Bitcoin?: the mechanics behind the story.
- How Bitcoin Is Used Today: what people actually do with it now.