The Revolutionary Journey of Bitcoin: From 2009 to 2021

Investors who purchased Bitcoin in late May of 2017 and held it until today have received a 3,100% return in just four years. Although Bitcoin exploded into the mainstream investing space in 2021, it has been around for a long time before that.

Everything began in August 2008, when the world was in the grip of a financial crisis. Unbeknownst to the general public at the time, the domain Bitcoin.org was registered, and that small step would end up revolutionizing the financial world.

Satoshi Nakamoto published a whitepaper in October outlining a decentralized system that was a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”

If you'd bought $1,000 of Bitcoin in 2010, you'd be worth $35M | Ars  Technica

In January 2009, the Bitcoin network’s first-ever block of bitcoins was mined, and Nakamoto sent 10 bitcoins to Hal Finney, spawning a counterculture. On May 22, 2010, the first “real” bitcoin transaction occurred when Laszlo Hanyecz purchased two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins, which are now worth $29,810,000!

The cryptocurrency continued to grow in popularity, and the first cryptocurrency stock exchange, Bitcoin Market, debuted the same year. Bitcoin’s price had already risen from $0.0008 to $0.08 by July, and BitPay had received over 10,000 transactions by January 2013. Fast forward to 2014, and Bitcoin was beginning to make a name for itself in the media, with the release of a documentary titled The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin. By February 2015, the Bitcoin price had risen to $262, and by November 2017, Bitcoin had officially reached $10,000.

In 2018, cryptocurrency began to enter mainstream culture and garnered media attention, but it also experienced its first major crash, plummeting to $3,200. As a result, thousands of scam claims were made against the currency, and the charts moved sideways. The following year, Bitcoin’s price remained volatile, remaining above $3,190 after falling to its lowest level in mid-June, and then soaring back to $10,000–before falling again to $7,112.73 in December 2019.

The pandemic struck in 2020, plunging the economy into one of its most uncertain periods in recent memory. Despite the volatile market, cryptocurrency has grown in popularity as a short-term trade as well as a long-term investment. Whether it was the increased amount of free time at home or a desire to finally learn about long-term investments, the pandemic sparked a surge in interest in cryptocurrency.

In 2021, Bitcoin experienced epic crashes as well as all-time historical highs, reaching nearly $65,000 in April before crashing and then pushing towards $67,000 in October.

On 9 June 2021, Bitcoin became the first cryptocurrency to be adopted as legal tender when El Salvador announced it would become the world’s first country to make Bitcoin a medium of exchange. At least five countries will have followed El Salvador’s lead and accepted Bitcoin as legal tender by the end of next year. What comes next for the cryptocurrency remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: Bitcoin has upended the traditional financial world and forever changed the way people send, receive, and store assets.

It only makes sense that Bitcoin, as one of the most iconic entities in the DeFi movement, would be celebrated by Momento, a new platform that celebrates the biggest and best players in the crypto world, including DEFI and NFTs.

Momento’s mission is to pay tribute to some of the most memorable and captivating moments in cryptocurrency history over the last ten years. The company intends to accomplish this by evoking nostalgia through art in two separate projects, one of which will highlight prominent crypto projects and the other of which will highlight some of the most talked about moments of the previous decade.

The project aims to honor historical moments and ensure that they are remembered far beyond their current glory, and that they can “stand the test of time and not fade away with hype, unlike most other NFTs that we see today,” according to a press release from the company. Momento will create a collectible series of NFTs that trace the history of Bitcoin and other well-known cryptocurrencies, from their inception to their widespread adoption in the world today.

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