The first Bitcoin block carried a newspaper headline. When the genesis block was mined on 3 January 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto inscribed a line from The Times: "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." The white paper itself, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, went out to a cryptography mailing list 18 years ago today, Cointelegraph reported.
That origin is the thread the anniversary pieces pull on. Cointelegraph traces the path from coins worth pennies to a regulated US exchange-traded product, while CoinDesk published two opinion pieces asking what Bitcoin has truly done in 18 years and arguing that small businesses are still paying for the bailouts the white paper answered.
Key numbers
- 10,000 BTC paid for two pizzas on 22 May 2010, worth about $41 at the time and about $780 million at today's prices, according to Cointelegraph
- 850,000 BTC lost by Mt. Gox, then the largest Bitcoin exchange, when it stopped trading in February 2014
- $6.3 billion taken in this week's Binance hack, the largest crypto exchange hack on record
- 0.67% transaction fees' share of total miner revenue in the 90 days to 4 October
Four cycles, and a collapse at the end of three of them
Bitcoin first traded above $1,000 in late 2013, as the Silk Road darknet marketplace drew public attention. Three months later Mt. Gox went offline, and the phrase "not your keys, not your coins" entered the language.
The next run took the price from below $1,000 at the start of 2017 to almost $20,000 in December that year, alongside a boom in initial coin offerings. The same autumn, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin "a fraud," China banned ICOs in September 2017, and the block size war ended in the August 2017 hard fork that created Bitcoin Cash.
The pandemic cycle followed: rates fell, liquidity flooded markets, and Bitcoin recovered from the March 2020 panic to almost $69,000 in November 2021. Beijing banned crypto transactions and mining in September 2021, and FTX collapsed in November 2022.
Then, in January 2024, the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved the first US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded products after years of rejections. Bitcoin traded above $100,000 for the first time at the end of that year and set a record above $126,000 in October 2025. Dimon's bank moved from dismissal to letting clients hold the asset.
In plain words: a spot exchange-traded product is a fund that holds the asset itself and trades on a stock exchange like a share. It let investors get exposure to Bitcoin through a regulated broker instead of managing wallets and private keys, which is why the 2024 approval is treated as a turning point in these retrospectives.
The open questions are about security, not history
Cointelegraph lists four unresolved ones. Quantum computing could break the cryptography securing the network, and a proposed upgrade known as BIP-360 would add a new output type to reduce some of that exposure, though the block size war showed how hard agreement on a change can be. The $6.3 billion Binance hack has renewed questions about centralized exchanges. Institutions now hold enough BTC that some holders ask whether ownership is concentrating. And with transaction fees at 0.67% of miner revenue over the 90 days to 4 October, and below 5% for most of Bitcoin's history, there is a gap to fill as the block subsidy shrinks with each halving.
On the regulatory side, Cointelegraph points to the GENIUS Act's federal stablecoin framework, SEC guidance on how securities laws apply to crypto assets, and Europe's MiCA rules.
None of the three pieces I read claims to settle who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Cointelegraph notes that Craig Wright repeatedly said he was, and that the UK High Court rejected his claim in 2024.