Revolutionary. If one word and only one word could describe bitcoin, it would be that one. Nothing about this cryptocurrency is normal, from the folklore surrounding its creator, to the gargantuan problem that this technology overcame and most importantly the impact it has on the cryptocurrency sphere and world at large today. In the same way that Vaseline has become synonymous with petroleum jelly around the world so has Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. This author would go as far to wager that more people are familiar with Bitcoin as a word than they are cryptocurrency. It is undeniably the poster boy of cryptorrency. 

Bitcoin is the world’s first cryptocurrency. It was created by the mysterious figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto and released in 2009. Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency that allows its users to send Bitcoins via the bitcoin peer to peer network with the transactions being recorded on a public ledger called a blockchain. Bitcoins are created through a process called mining and today can be used to pay for other tokens or exchanged for more traditional forms of currency. For the more adventurous, even as an investment vehicle. 

The are few details available out there about the creator of Bitcoin as he has chosen a secretive life. The individual (or group of individuals) goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto who claims to be born in 1975 and calls Japan home. In 2008 Satoshi released the white paper for Bitcoin entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." In it he noted, what he believed to be, the problems plaguing traditional internet payment methods such as the possibility of fraud in trust based models and the increased transaction fees needed to maintain a trust based model. He proposed a solution that would be “based on cryptographic proof instead of trust allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.” In order to overcome the double spending problem (a situation where  the same digital money is spent twice for one reason or another) which had dogged previous attempts at a cryptocurrency Satoshi suggested a peer to peer network that would record the transaction time stamp and use this as proof of the exact order of transactions thereby avoiding the double spend problem. The security of this method relying on the peers to essentially have more computing power than whoever was trying to disrupt how information was recorded within the blockchain.  

Imagine a group of ten friends. Whenever they do business amongst themselves, the sender of money must announce to everyone in their group that they are sending x amount to x friend after which all of them who hear the announcement will proceed to record the transactions. If friend 5 and 6 are absent for a while or down, upon their return, they simply have to ask their friends for a list of transactions and the transaction record which is most common amongst them will be determined to be the correct one and they will continue recording from that list too. It is through a similar mechanism that Bitcoin ensures that no double spend occurs in the absence of a central authority to verify transactions.  

Bitcoin was originally created to solely be a decentralised digital currency. There is no evidence to suggest that Satoshi intended there to be other uses however, Bitcoin has morphed into something much larger. The relationship between Bitcoin and the greater cryptocurrency world is a fascinating one. Bitcoin has evolved into a vehicle people use as an investment tool. At the beginning of 2017 bitcoin was trading between $750 to $920. At the end of the year it was trading at around $15,900. At its peak the cryptocurrency reached $20,000 for a single coin. At the time of writing, it is trading at $6,600. There exists a volatile nature to bitcoin and it is this which people try use to their advantage. Unfortunately for the rest of the cryptocurrency community, as mentioned earlier due to the popularity of the cryptocurrency, anything that happens to the value of a BTC reverberates throughout the community. If bitcoin goes up so do the other tokens, conversely if bitcoin goes down so does everyone else.  The impact of bitcoin even goes past the cryptocurrency community with an increase in GPU prices being caused by people who want to mine bitcoins. 

Some view Bitcoin with scepticism, others with admiration. Regardless of their views Bitcoin will always go down as a pioneer. It’s blockchain technology made cryptocurrency a reality upon which other a building more exciting more capable platforms that will change the world. Regardless of the outcome of BTC, the crypto world will be grateful for the doors opened by Satoshi and Bitcoin.