Rolling out bitcoin’s code the following January with the mining of the genesis block, bitcoin’s first year was inauspicious at best. Eleven years later, however, most metrics point towards a bright future. The white paper’s birthday month proved to be one of the best yet.
Halloween 2019 marks the eleventh anniversary of the release of the white paper for the first fully decentralized, peer-to-peer electronic cash by anonymous creator(s) Satoshi Nakomoto. In the wake of the Great Recession of 2007–2009, a single email for a small collective of cypherpunks proved to be the catalyst for a monetary revolution.
“I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party”, Satoshi wrote to open his email, attaching the bitcoin white paper.
October in review
Looking at the numbers, the last 10 months have given bitcoin hodlers much to be thankful for; October, even more so.
Bitcoin’s price jumped some 40 percent in 24 hours on Oct. 26, briefly breaking out to $10,000. As ARK Invest analyst Yassine Elmandjra wrote on Twitter, the price movement has only happened three times in bitcoin’s history.
The previous two times Bitcoin saw a >40% daily gain, it was trading at $0.40 and $5.65.
Today, Bitcoin’s 42% swing is the 3rd largest daily gain in price history.
Data via @coinmetrics
– Yassine Elmandjra (@yassineARK) October 26, 2019
Bitcoin’s hash rate – a good metric for the amount of energy put towards mining bitcoin’s and securing the network – hit an all-time high at over 110 exahashes per second (EH/s) on Oct. 23.
As recent initial public offering filings for mining giants Canaan and Bitmain show, bitcoin mining has gone a long way since the early days of CPU farming, and is now big business.
Bitcoin also just mined its 18 million coin, leaving a mad scramble for the last 3 million. As halvings continue to occur every 210,000 blocks or so, the last coin won’t be minted till 2140.
Bitcoin fees collected reached $1 billion in total earlier this week too, right in time for today’s celebrations.
‘Smart Money Came In’ After First Bitcoin ETF Rejection – Analyst
Bitcoin changed its volatility characteristics as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss unveiled the first Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), new data claims.
Uploaded to social media by well-known statistician Willy Woo on Nov. 1, a chart of Bitcoin volatility shows a new phase beginning around March 2017.
Woo: “Smart money came in” after Winklevoss rejection
This, the time at which U.S. regulators rejected the Winklevoss’ ETF application, was nonetheless a watershed moment for Bitcoin.
“My thesis has always been that the 2017 Winklevoss ETF attempt was the first time in Bitcoin’s history that it was described as a financial instrument instead of drug money”, Woo summarized.
He added:
“It was covered in the WSJ. Smart money came in, the rise of crypto quant funds.”
Bitcoin market resilience grows
According to Woo’s chart, the ETF denial formed the definitive reversal of lessening volatility which had characterized Bitcoin since 2012.
Thereafter, volatility increased, albeit not to the extent seen during that year. Further ETF rejections similarly failed to produce the same price impact seen in March 2017.
As Cointelegraph reported, volatility nonetheless remains a point of reflection for market participants keen to attract more new investment into the cryptocurrency space.
Earlier this year, Brian Armstrong, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, highlighted the need to reduce the impact of volatility through the use of instruments such as stablecoins.
