*Genesis Block mined by Satoshi Nakamoto. *Hal Finney receives the first Bitcoin transaction. *First Bitcoin–Fiat exchange rate, Bitcoin becomes numerable. *Bitcoin reaches parity with USD. 1 BTC = 1 USD. *The first block halving at block 210,000, reducing reward to 25 BTC per block.
May 22, 2010. Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John’s pizzas in Florida, United States. At the time, 10,000 BTC was worth about US$41.
October 1, 2013. FBI agents arrested Ross Ulbricht at the San Francisco Public Library. The FBI confiscated 144,000 BTC, worth around US$28.5 million at the time.
*ASIC mining dominates, large mining pools and hardware firms, hashpower concentrates geographically. *Not your keys, not your coins becomes doctrine. *Bitcoin Cash forked off, later, further split to BSV. *Grassroot node operators activated SegWit (user-activated soft fork).
February 7-28, 2014. Mt. Gox suspended BTC withdrawals and halted trading. Filed for bankruptcy in Tokyo, lost 850,000 BTC, 7% of all BTC in circulation at the time.
2015–2017. Big-blockers and the New York Agreement, pushed to increase block size. The conservative camp favored Bitcoin constrained, prioritizing off-chain scaling.
*Bitcoin’s post-war consolidation era, consensus is sacred and ossification becomes a feature. *BTC becomes digital hard asset and monetary alternative. *First nation-state entry with El Salvador adopts BTC as legal tender. *Mining geopolitics reset with China bans mining and hashrate migrates globally. *Bitcoin differentiates itself from crypto with Terra/Luna and FTX collapse. Bitcoin ≠ crypto. *Self-custody & sovereignty culture matures.
2019-2023. The Lightning Torch demonstrated its viability. The network hit record-high capacity, with integrations. Bitcoin becomes settlement base.
2021-2023. Taproot expanded Bitcoin’s expressive capacity, and Ordinals revealed it. Together, they reignited builder interest by enabling experimentation at the edges.
*Post-Taproot building wave expands with Runes Protocol, attracting experimentalists and speculators. *Purist Revivalists push back on non-monetary usage, while Resistant Experimentalists argue for edge innovation. *Institutions enter at scale with spot Bitcoin ETFs go live, BTC becomes a legitimate allocatable asset. *Bitcoin enters capital markets, BTC used as collateral, structured exposure, yield base with financial engineerings. *AI and Bitcoin coordination emerges, Bitcoin explored as neutral trust anchor.
2024. Runes Protocol sparked a brief memecoin hype cycle on Bitcoin, while BitVM unlocked a rush of new trust-minimized Layer-2s atop Bitcoin network.
2025. Public and private companies accumulate BTC long-term. BTC moves from hedge to balance-sheet reserve. BTC supply starts getting locked, not traded.
