First bitcoin transaction took place 10 years ago

It has been ten years since the first transaction with the digital currency bitcoin took place. On January 12, Hal Finney received ten bitcoins from creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Its use has grown tremendously since then, with the price of bitcoin going through huge fluctuations.

The first bitcoin client became available as open source on January 9, 2009, and was installed by Hal Finney, a professional programmer. He left in a tweet on January 11, he knew he had ‘bitcoin running’. It would take some time after that before someone actually bought something with bitcoin; two pizzas at pizza chain Papa John’s for 10,000 bitcoin in 2010 is one of the first known transactions. Converted to today’s price, that would amount to almost 16 million euros per pizza.

Because bitcoin is open source, other cryptocurrencies came on the market over time; by now there are thousands available, with Ethereum and Ripple being household names. Meanwhile, bitcoin has continued to grow and hundreds of millions of transactions have been made with it. However, the price of bitcoin fluctuates strongly: after a few years of growth, a bitcoin was still worth about 10,000 euros a year ago, but currently it is only about 3100 euros.

Scandals have also taken place over the years, in which the incident with the bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox was one of the greatest. In 2014, it was one of the largest exchanges worldwide, trading a large portion of bitcoins, but in April of that year, Mt. Gox announced that about 750,000 bitcoins had been lost, after which a bankruptcy was filed. That raised suspicions towards the CEO of Mt. Gox, and many investors filed lawsuits to get their money back.