Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a digital currency proposed in a nine-page white paper published on 31 October 2008 under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. It lets payments travel directly between parties without a financial institution, replacing the trusted third party with a peer-to-peer network that timestamps transactions into a proof-of-work chain. Nodes that validate the chain are rewarded with newly created bitcoins; the reward started at 50 BTC and is halved every 210,000 blocks, so the supply approaches but never exceeds 21 million. Launched in 2009, bitcoin remained a niche of cryptography enthusiasts until prices and media attention surged in 2013 — the year of its first documented all-time high of $1,240 on 4 December. Regulators followed: the IRS treats virtual currency as property (2014), the CFTC called bitcoin a commodity (2015), the ECB published two reports on virtual currency schemes (2012, 2015) and the BIS devoted a chapter of its 2018 Annual Economic Report to the technology's limitations. After a federal court vacated its Grayscale order, the SEC approved 11 spot bitcoin exchange-traded products on 10 January 2024. El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender in 2021. Volatile market figures in this article carry the date of the source that recorded them.