History & Culture

Where Bitcoin came from and the moments that shaped it.

• The whitepaper

  The nine pages from 2008 that explained how digital cash could work without banks.

• Satoshi Nakamoto

  Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, who built it, ran it two years, and vanished.

• The genesis block

  Block zero — Bitcoin's first block, mined January 3, 2009, with a message inside.

• Pizza Day

  May 22, 2010: two pizzas bought for 10,000 BTC — bitcoin's first real purchase.

• The cypherpunks

  The 1990s mailing list that decided privacy needed code, not permission — Bitcoin's ancestors.

• Mt. Gox

  The exchange that held most of Bitcoin's trading — then lost 850,000 coins.

• The blocksize war

  The 2015–2017 fight over who rules Bitcoin. Users won.

• HODL

  A drunken typo for "hold" that became Bitcoin's word for unshakeable conviction.