Thread by @PastryEth

#Bitcoin & the crypto market have been through a lot in the past, both good & bad.

For this reason, I’ve compiled a list of its most iconic moments, in what I’d like to call the crypto nostalgia thread.

Here are crypto’s most memorable moments..

1. Bitcoin Whitepaper

It’s the moment that started it all

On the 31st of October, 2008, an anonymous user under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a link to the $BTC Whitepaper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Preer electronic cash system” on the cryptography mailing list forum

2. Genesis block

On Jan 3rd, 2009, the $BTC network was created when Satoshi mined the genesis block

Embedded in this block was the text “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”, which references a headline posted by The Times

3. First $BTC transaction

Three days after the genesis block was mined, the first ever $BTC transaction was recorded.

In block 170 of the network, Satoshi Nakamoto sent long time cryptographer & first user of the Bitcoin software Hal Finney a test transaction of 10 $BTC.

4. $BTC Pizza

In the summer of 2010, the first commercial tx of $BTC was made.

On May 22, 2010, software dev Laszlo Hanyecz posted on the #Bitcoin forum requesting for someone to bring him 2 large pizzas in exchange for 10k $BTC, worth roughly $41 at the time & $500m today.

5. Wikileaks

One of the last posts Satoshi made before his disappearance was in reference to the emerging story of Wikileaks & its possibility of turning to $BTC for payments after the US forced companies like VISA, MasterCard, & PayPal to block the organization.

6. Silk Road

After earlier proof of concept payments, the first major users of $BTC were on the dark net marketplace called Silk Road.

During its 30 months of existence, Silk Road transacted 9.9m $BTC ($500B) before being shut down by the FBI

7. China bans $BTC

On Dec. 5th, 2013, China outlawed third party payment agencies from using $BTC, ordering them to “stop any custody, trading, & other services related to the currency.”

This led to a steep sell off in the market as investors raced to cash in on their assets

8. Mt. Gox

At its peak in 2013, the crypto exchange was handling 70% of $BTC txs worldwide.

Their successes were ended rather abruptly, after hackers managed to steal 840k $BTC from the companies hot wallet with unencrypted private keys, forcing the company to go bankrupt.

9. Birth of $ETH

In late 2013, developer & $BTC forum writer Vitalik Buterin was working with Mastercoin when he proposed they make a protocol that is more generalized & supports many more contracts.

This idea was called ultimate scripting, but later evolved into $ETH

10. Gavin Wood $ETH

In an about me message in 2013, Gavin reached out to Vitalik offering to build $ETH

Gavin would go on to play a critical role in its development, & is largely accredited for changing the vision of $ETH as a platform to one of building programmable money

11. The DAO

“The DAO” is a virtual vc that raised 12.7m $ETH in 2016.

All was well until the creators decided to split the DAO into two.

This left it vulnerable to a recursive call exploit, which allowed an attacker to drain 3.6M $ETH from the fund & led to a hard fork of $ETH

12. $BTC hard fork

In Oct. 2016, the SegWit soft fork for $BTC was proposed, which aimed at scaling improvements to optimize $BTC block size.

In July 2017, this upgrade was “locked in” leading users who were dissatisfied with the upgrade to fork the software & create $BTC Cash

13. Parity Exploit

On Nov. 2017, GitHub user devops199 posted the following under the issues section of the Parity Multi-Sig Library: “I accidentally killed it”.

Moments later, he exploited a vulnerability in the contract code blocking funds from 587 wallets totalling 513k $ETH

14. Bitconnect

The largest Ponzi scheme in crypto

Despite many red flags, $BCC reached a $2.6B mc before the inevitable happened

In early 2018, things went downhill. The project announced they’d shut down the platform & its exchange, causing the price to go from $432 to $.68

15. Covid

Rumors spread around about a new virus making its way across the globe, but the extent to which it would impact the market was little known

That is until the WHO declared it a global pandemic on Mar. 11, 2020, after which $BTC saw its price plummet 50% in a single day

16. Yield farming

The start of DeFi summer.

In June of 2020, $ETH based credit market Compound launched its governance token, $COMP, which was distributed via “Yield Farming”, a process by which users lend their assets into a liquidity pool & receive rewards in tokens

17. $Sushi

In what is now called a vampire attack, the SushiSwap project launched allowing users to provide liquidity to Uniswap, deposit their LP tokens to SushiSwap smart contracts, & earn yield by farming $SUSHI

This process attracted over $1B of assets within a week

18. MicroStrategy purchases $BTC

On August 11th, 2020, MicroStrategy bought 21,454 $BTC worth over $250m, which marks the first publicly traded company to buy $BTC as part of its capital allocation strategy.

19. $Uni airdrop

On Sep. 17th, 2020, the largest $ETH based decentralized exchange initiated an airdrop of their governance token, $UNI, to anyone that used the platform before Sep. 1st.

Over 126m tokens were claimed, totalling over $2.8B of free money for its users

20. Tesla $BTC

In early 2021, Tesla became the second notable institution to allocate capital to $BTC

In a filing made to the SEC on Feb. 8th, 2021, the company stated that it purchased $1.5B worth of $BTC, & planned on accepting it as payment for their products.

21. Beeple

On Mar. 11th, 2021, digital artist Mike Winkelmann sold his work “Everydays — The First 5000 Days” collection for $69 million in Christie’s Auction

This placed him among the top 3 most valuable living artists, & set the record for the most expensive NFT ever sold

22. Tesla breaks up with $BTC

$BTC was rallying after the news that multiple notable institutions had bought a substantial amount of $BTC

However, this hype was cut short when Tesla announced that they would no longer except $BTC as payment after citing environmental concerns

23. China cracks down on mining

Another day, another China ban.

Released just in time for the Tesla BTC controversy, local authorities in China’s Sichuan province ordered a halting to $BTC mining in the region, signalling a 90% estimated drop in China’s mining capacity.

24. El Salvador

Among the widespread adoption of $BTC in 2021, the most notable event took place in June, when the country of El Salvador because the first country in the world to adopt $BTC as legal tinder.