Cryptocurrency has become all the rage these days and everyone wants a slice of it. From Bollywood movie stars promoting it to every budding investor putting their hard-earned money in the tiniest sliver of bitcoin to earn big money, it has truly come a long way.?
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It was on this day, 13 years ago, when Bitcoin¡¯s white paper was shared with the world by one Satoshi Nakamoto, where he called it a ¡°peer-to-peer electronic cash system.¡±
He foresaw the need for an online payment system that was self-governing, secure and limited in quantity.?
The paper¡¯s initial sentence highlighted how it intended to send payments from one party to another, bypassing financial intermediaries along the way.?
When the paper was first published, many computer scientists were oblivious to the fact that it solved a problem that was unsolved for decades -- the Byzantine Generals problem.?
As per a report by Bitcoin.com, Nakamoto told the pseudonymous member of Metzdown.com¡¯s crypto mailing list, James A Donald that the proof of work chain was the solution to the aforementioned problem.
The paper highlighted the advantages of triple-entry bookkeeping -- compared to single and double ledger systems -- offered a nearly trustless system if one were to remove trusting the autonomous system.
Nakamoto explains in the white paper, ¡°The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party.?
The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous.¡±
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He added, We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. They [honest nodes] vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them.¡±?
Soon after, in January 2009, the Bitcoin network was launched, with each Bitcoin priced at just $0.0008.
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At the time, it was seen as a threat by the traditional financial institutions, while many even mocked its application in its nascent stages.?
Today, however, it has transformed into an asset with a market valuation of over $1 trillion and also the rollout of over 10,000 kinds of cryptocurrencies that made use of the innovative design made by Nakamoto.?
The creator of the cryptocurrency today remains one of the biggest mysteries of the world -- no one really knows his/her true identity as he disappeared after the launch of Bitcoin in 2010.?
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While there are countless theories online that claim Satoshi is someone or the other, or even dead, he continues to own over a million bitcoins, which according to today¡¯s valuation is worth over $60 billion.?
Have you invested in any kind of cryptocurrency? What¡¯s your experience like? Tell us in the comments below, and keep reading Indiatimes.com for the latest science and technology news.