On Its 14th Birthday, Bitcoin’s 1,690,706,971% Gain Looks Kind of… Well Insane

Happy Birthday Bitcoin! It was on this day 14 years ago that the first Bitcoin block was mined. Despite numerous doubters, haters, and premature obituaries, its performance has been quite impressive. On Its 14th Birthday, Bitcoin’s 1,690,706,971% Gain Looks Kind of… Well Insane

Even after the first block was mined, it took awhile for the coins to have a market price. There was a transaction in October 2009, where 5050 coins were sold for $5.02, giving each one a price of roughly $0.00099. Since then the price is up around 1,690,706,971%. Not bad at all.

Pompliano: Satoshi Should Win Nobel Peace Prize For Bitcoin

Annual January 3rd “Proof of Keys” Celebration of The Genesis Block!

Since we’re not used to seeing numbers like 1,690,706,971% in traditional finance, it would appear as if Bitcoin has delivered returns unlike any other in history.

But to some extent this unique performance is a mirage, owing to the fact that there are publicly quoted prices so early in its existence.

Meta Platforms Inc. (then Facebook.Inc) was launched in February 2004. Fourteen years after its existence, in February 2018, it had a market cap of around $500 billion. By comparison today, Bitcoin’s market cap is just $322 billion, according to CoinGecko.

In other words, if you start counting both since their inception, Meta has accrued more value than Bitcoin. The difference is, of course, that Meta didn’t have a publicly quoted price so early in its existence. The company only went public in 2012, by which point it had a $70 billion market cap already.

Meta is a good comparison for several reasons. Both Bitcoin and Meta are both network-effects entities, whose value is dependent on achieving a critical mass of users or owners.

Neither is useful or valuable as a standalone piece of technology. There’s no point in owning Bitcoin if nobody else will accept it or buy it.

There’s no point of posting a photo to Facebook if there’s nobody else there to look at it or comment on it.

Both are global. Both are associated with a single founder. Bitcoin hasn’t changed the world like Meta has.

So Meta has a headstart, but who ultimately knows. Both Meta and Bitcoin more or less created new categories, with each having seen several competitors emerge.

And both have kind of gone nowhere over the last five years, after surging massively during the 2020-2021 boom, suggesting that from an investor perspective they’re seen as similar types of assets.

So hats off to Satoshi Nakamoto. Some 14 years later, Bitcoin hasn’t changed the world. And its performance isn’t unprecedented. But it is up there along with some of the great tech stocks of the last decade.

Community Celebrates Bitcoin Genesis Day By Sending BTC To The Genesis Block

The wallet address now contains around 68.56 BTC, which is worth around $1.1 million at the time of writing.

As Bitcoin has its 14th birthday, Bitcoiners from around the world are celebrating in various ways, with some opting to send BTC to the address containing the rewards for mining its genesis block.

On Jan. 3, 2009, pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto mined the genesis block, which led to the minting of the first 50 BTC.

This instance paved the way for an entire industry to be developed, with millions of people working toward a similar vision for the future of money. 14 years later, many are showing their respect by posting various greetings to the cryptocurrency that started it all.

Essen, Germany

Celebrating #Bitcoin Genesis Day
&
sound money#gesundesgeld pic.twitter.com/3Ol5E2QdSZ

— El Bitcoin ambassador (@elbitcoinamb) January 3, 2023

Some are tipping their hats to the Bitcoin creator by sending small amounts of BTC to their wallet address. Since its creation, many people have randomly sent Bitcoin to the account, pushing its total balance to 68.56 BTC, worth $1.1 million at the time of writing.

Bitcoiners have shared various messages, including a video showing the newspaper containing the headline stamped on the genesis block.

Blow out your candle #Bitcoin Genesis block! pic.twitter.com/KoY1GPbs4O

— TIP_NZ (@tip_nz) January 3, 2023

On Dec. 28 — a week before Bitcoin Genesis Day — business intelligence firm MicroStrategy added more Bitcoin to its holdings. The move divided the crypto community, with some pointing out concerns over one entity holding such a large amount of BTC.

In other news, tax attorney and CPA Selva Ozelli recently highlighted MicroStrategy’s intent to reduce capital gains in the tax year by selling BTC at a loss.

Ozelli told Cointelegraph that, at the moment, there is no crypto-specific wash sale rule that prohibits selling at a loss and reacquiring within 30 days.

Updated: 4-5-2023

Happy 48th Birthday, Satoshi Nakamoto

We love you but we don’t miss you.

Today we celebrate the creator of Bitcoin on Satoshi Nakamoto’s birthday. Happy birthday, Satoshi!

We don’t know who Satoshi is and we likely never will, but the pseudonymous founder does apparently have a birthday. Satoshi entered a birth date when they registered the pseudonym with The P2P Foundation.

Satoshi’s birthday is, according to that registration, April 5, 1975. (For proof, Satoshi’s age showed up as 38 on The P2P Foundation on April 4, 2014, and as 40 on April 5, 2015, implying an April 5, 1975, birthday.)

Of course, the Bitcoin faithful have drawn up all sorts of theories about why Satoshi chose this date specifically – besides it actually being their real birthday.

One has to do with the anniversary of Executive Order 6102, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt banned the private ownership of gold on April 5, 1933. Americans handed over gold to the government and, with the Gold Reserve Act the following year, the gold content of the U.S. dollar was increased from $20 to $35 an ounce.

Really, that was just a devaluation of the dollar because it now took more dollars to buy the exact same amount of gold.

Was Satoshi winking at us regarding the failure of a government-controlled money? Sure!

Satoshi’s birth year is apparently 1975, which is perhaps a salute to President Gerald Ford who repealed Executive Order 6102 in 1974. (It was effective on Dec. 31, 1974, which is basically 1975, but who’s counting?)

Satoshi winks, yet again.

On this particular birthday I want to shine a light on something else about Satoshi: Their real identity or identities. Was it Hal Finney? Nick Szabo? Adam Back? Len Sassaman? John Nash? Was it all of them together? Was it none of them and some other gallivanting group of cypherpunks?

No one knows, and it doesn’t matter.

At all.

Bitcoin is an open-source protocol that has outgrown a founder or founders. The fact that Satoshi stepped away from Bitcoin when it was hardly a toddler in 2011 only to have it grow into a $500 billion global money system elicits two thoughts: 1) Satoshi is a gracious founder who knew what Bitcoin would be, but only if the protocol was leaderless and 2) Bitcoin’s ascension to notoriety is basically a small miracle.

Who knows what Satoshi was thinking when they stepped away, but Bitcoin probably wouldn’t have come as far.

Would Bitcoin have become as important as it is if we knew who Satoshi was and we looked to them for guidance? Would Satoshi have supported Taproot? Segregated Witness? What about Ordinal non-fungible tokens?

Maybe, maybe not.

The point is that it doesn’t matter, Bitcoin belongs to everyone now. There is no leader. That might make some things messy, but at least it’s our mess.

If it was revealed to us in a collective fever dream who Satoshi was, that person or persons would not be handed complete ownership over the project. If it were, there would be plenty of dissenters.

On Its 14th Birthday, Bitcoin’s 1,690,706,971% Gain Looks Kind of… Well Insane

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Monty H. & Carolyn A.

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