Today's Bitcoin Lead
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Bitcoin Spew
The Reddhead newsletter had a great history lesson about Bitcoin as Reddcoin celebrated it's first birthday in February.
Happy 1st Birthday Reddcoin!
This week Reddcoin turned 1 year old and members of Reddcointalk and the Reddcoin subreddit lined up to offer their best wishes to the infant cryptocurrency.
With the amount of development work that has gone into the project it is quite easy to forget how very young Reddcoin is. To put things in perspective it is worth taking a quick look at a couple of other currencies, starting with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin - 1st birthday 3 January 2010
Although the Bitcoin Whitepaper was published by Satoshi Nakamoto on 31 October 2008, it was not until 3 January 2009 that the first block of the blockchain - the genesis block - was mined by Satoshi. The first Bitcoin transaction took place on 12 January 2009, between Satoshi Nakamoto and American cryptographer Hal Finney.
On 5 October 2009 the first Bitcoin exchange rate was published byNew Liberty Standard. By calculating the cost of electricity used to generate Bitcoins the rate was set at $1 per 1,309 BTC, making 1 Bitcoin worth less than a tenth of a cent.
On 10 October 2009 the first online chat was set up for Bitcoin when the Bitcoin-dev channel was registered on freenode IRC. Over the course of 2009, before Bitcoin became 1 year old, versions 0.1 and 0.2 of the Bitcoin wallet were released.
And besides the above, nothing much happened. Of course Bitcoin was a new concept that no-one knew about, but it is still striking to see how it all began. To push the point home, the famous 10,000 BTC pizza was not bought until Bitcoin was nearly one and a half, on 22 May 2010!
Euro - 1st birthday 1 January 1999
The Euro was launched on 1 January 1999 in non-physical form (travellers cheques, electronic transfers, banking, etc.) at midnight. At the time of launch the national currencies of participating countries had their exchange rates fixed to one another, as a way to implement unified monetary policy. The Euro did not actually get its own physical notes and coins until three years later, on 1 January 2002.
It appears that even a fiat currency like the Euro was not immune to what cryptocurrency enthusiasts would refer to as a “pump and dump”. Buoyed by high expectations and plenty of optimistic expert opinion, on the first day of trading (5 January) the Euro climbed to US$1.19 as it was rapidly adopted by traders. However the Euro dropped to parity with the dollar by the end of the year, a 16% drop in value that may not seem much compared with cryptocurrency... but it was enough to spur emergency action from the G7 to set up support for the European currency in 2001.
Reddcoin - 1st birthday / public release 2 February 2014
Reddcoin was launched at a time when the cryptocurrency scene was blooming following the huge mainstream attention paid to Bitcoin at the end of 2013. One year on and the majority of the diverse cryptocurrency projects set in motion in 2014 have faded away and been resigned to crypto-history.
Thanks to its team and dedicated community Reddcoin is one of the few projects that continues to forge ahead with innovation and promise for the future.
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