Happy Birthday Bitcoin: 15 years ago the world's first cryptocurrency was born

On 3 January 2009, the first blockchain block of Bitcoin was mined. And that is the date that is conventionally used to celebrate the birthday of what was and has remained after all this time the world's first cryptocurrency. So we can say that Bitcoin celebrates its 15th birthday today. The other significant date is 31 October 2008, when the creator Satoshi Nakamoto (still unknown to such an extent that many speculate that he may also be a group of people, certainly among the cryptographic experts of the 1970s cypherpunk milieu) published the white paper 'Bitcoin: a peer- to-peer electronic cash system'. A document of a few pages in which it announced to the world how the Bitcoin protocol works.

The first block of Bitcoin's blockchain, known as the genesis block or block number 0, was then mined on 3 January 2009. This block contained a hidden message that read: 'The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks', a reference to the front page of the British financial newspaper. Many see this message as a comment on the instability of the traditional banking system. Bitcoin is therefore launched at a not accidental historical moment (the crisis of the global banking system post-Lehman Brothers) with the idea of offering everyone a neutral, decentralised unit of value, potentially not subject to the devaluation that traditional currencies tend to undergo over time, which since 1971 (when US president Nixon put an end to the convertibility of the dollar into gold by breaking the 1944 Bretton Woods agreements) are defined as fiat, i.e. fiduciary. They derive their value from the trust placed in the issuing entities. In this sense Bitcoin was born as an alternative, an extra technological possibility offered to those who want to decouple the concept of money from that of trust. This is why it is also referred to as a 'trust-less' system.

That idea, which at times borders on ideology, has come a long way since then. In terms of price: Bitcon started out at a few cents while today it is worth around 45 thousand dollars (with a peak in November2021 at 69 thousand dollars). Albeit with violent downward excursions difficult to handle emotionally by a traditional investor. But the biggest road has been travelled by the network. Because Bitcoin, even before being a financial asset, is a decentralised network that allows anyone to exchange their native unit of account: the satoshi. One Bitcoin corresponds to 100 million satoshi. Or to put it in mathematical terms one satoshi equals 0.00000001 Bitcoin.

In 2023 in the Bitcoin netowrk an amount of satoshi equivalent to $15 billion per day was exchanged. In addition, competition among miners, those who validate transactions by solving complex mathematical calculations and for this receive new Bitcoins as prizes as predicted in the white paper, is constantly increasing. This is measured in terms of hash rate: it reached an all-time high of 630 Exahash per second on 31 December 2023. 'Exahash per second' is a unit of measurement indicating the number of hash attempts (calculations) that can be performed in one second. "Exa-" is a prefix in the international system indicating a factor of 10^18, or one billion billion.

Behind these numbers lies the concept of 'proof of work' (proof of work or effort) that underlies the functioning of the newtork. Miners, in order to validate transactions, have to perform increasingly complex mathematical calculations (if competition increases between them) and therefore have to make 'more effort'. This effort consequently requires increasing energy expenditure. This is why some call Bitcoin an 'energy coin', a mathematical process that transforms the energy used to run the network to generate value. If the energy used to mine Bitcoin comes from renewable sources, the environmental impact of the network becomes zero. At the moment, this is not the case, but the path mapped out by the miners (who are 'forced' to switch from energy from fossil sources, such as coal or natural gas, to renewable in order to make their business costs efficient) is in the 'green' direction. So much so that to date it is estimated that more than half of the Bitcoins mined come from renewable energy sources.