Bitcoin is the world’s first cryptocurrency. It is a peer-to-peer currency and transaction system based on a consensus-based decentralized public ledger called a blockchain that records all transactions.

Now, bitcoin was envisioned in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, but it was the product of many decades of crypto and blockchain research and not just the work of one man. It was the utopian dream of cryptographers and free-traders to have a decentralized, borderless currency based on the blockchain. His dream is now a reality with the growing popularity of bitcoin and other altcoins around the world.

Now, the cryptocurrency was first implemented on the consensus-based blockchain in 2009 and the same year it was traded for the first time. In July 2010, the price of bitcoin was only 8 cents and the number of miners and nodes was quite a few compared to the tens of thousands today.

In the space of a year, the new altcoin had risen to $1 and was turning out to be an interesting prospect for the future. Mining was relatively easy and people made a lot of money by making trades and even paying with them in some cases.

Within six months, the coin had doubled back to $2. While the bitcoin price is not stable at any particular price point, it has been showing this insane growth pattern for some time. In July 2011, at one point, the coin went haywire and hit the record price of $31, but the market soon realized that it was overvalued compared to the gains made and corrected it back to $2.

December 2012 saw a healthy rise to $13, but soon enough, the price was going to explode. Within four months to April 2013, the price had risen to a whopping $266. It was later corrected to $100, but this astronomical rise in price propelled it into stardom for the first time and people began debating about it. a real world scenario with Bitcoin.

It was around this time that I became familiar with the new currency. I had my doubts, but the more I read about it, the more it became clear to me that the currency was the future, since it had no one to manipulate it or impose it on it. Everything had to be done with full consensus and that was what made him so strong and free.

So 2013 was the breakout year for the coin. Large companies began to publicly favor the acceptance of bitcoin, and blockchain became a popular topic for Computer Science programs. Many people then thought that Bitcoin had served its purpose and would now be established.

But, the coin became even more popular, with bitcoin ATMs set up all over the world and other competitors starting to flex their muscles at different angles of the market. Ethereum developed the first programmable blockchain and Litecoin and Ripple started out as cheaper and faster alternatives to bitcoin.

The magic figure of $1,000 was first broken in January 2017 and has since quadrupled through September. It is truly a remarkable achievement for a coin that was only worth 8 cents just seven years ago.

Bitcoin even survived a hard fork on August 1, 2017 and has risen nearly 70% since then, while even the Bitcoin Cash hard fork has managed to register some success. This is all due to the attractiveness of the coin and the stellar blockchain technology behind it.

While mainstream economists argue that it is a bubble and the entire cryptocurrency world would crash, it simply is not. There is no such bubble as it is an observable fact that it has, in fact, eaten up the shares of fiat currencies and money trading corporations.

The future is extremely bright for bitcoin and it is never too late to invest in it, both short and long term.