Bitcoin is nothing instantaneous, it‘s the result of over 40 years of development behind it, being crowned by Satoshi Nakamoto himself.

I think everyone here has at least once heard about the rich and interesting story about Bitcoins very rise. About how Satoshi Nakamoto made a project in 2009, that we call Bitcoin today and how he even was there in the early days to develop it further. But as great as Satoshi Nakamoto is, the idea of Bitcoin did not come out of the void.

In fact, there is over 40 years of history behind the cryptography that later developed itself into Bitcoin, after various successful and failing projects.

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Bitcoin pre-history chart (by danheld)

This graph perfectly shows it all, all the way from 1974 to 2009. In the first 10 years we had basic theoretical developments in the Cryptography sector by various pioneers and even the first ideas of “Untraceable payments“ by David Chaum for example. The next decade also had many ideas from the ordinary people about a system around Cryptography, for example the famous “Cypherpunk manifesto“ in 1993.

During the next decade we even had official products entering the market for the first time, like E-gold, Bit-gold, CyberCash. Since 2000, the idea of a digital currency even entered the mainstream with many video games having their own currencies and also many companies during the dotcom bubble having their online currencies. All of that crowned by Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney’s “Reusable Proof of Work“ papers, which most likely inspired Satoshi Nakamoto for his system too.

It really is a lot, the history of Crypto is not just 15 years old, but there are decades of events building up to the end-product that we now know as Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the work of decades of technological development, which makes it even so much greater.