Comment by drawkbox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drawkbox | Hacker News Reader

Armstrong said the Bitcoin paper came out in 2010, it actually came out in November 2008 and the first implementation of it was in January 2009 [1][2].

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies correlated with the Great Recession so that added fuel to the desire to have a safe currency if a national fiat failed suddenly.

> The domain name "bitcoin.org" was registered on 18 August 2008. In November 2008, a link to a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was posted to a cryptography mailing list. Nakamoto implemented the bitcoin software as open source code and released it in January 2009. The identity of Nakamoto remains unknown.

> In January 2009, the bitcoin network was created when Nakamoto mined the first block of the chain, known as the genesis block. Embedded in the coinbase of this block was the following text:

> > The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140320135003/https://bitcoin.o...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

FTA:

> While surfing the web at his parents’ house on Christmas of 2009, he encountered a nine-page paper written by a pseudonymous author named Satoshi Nakamoto.

Yeah the article has it correct. In the video on the article he opens with talking about the paper and said it came out in 2010. Maybe he first saw it then.

Part of Bitcoin/crypto success was due to the sketchiness of the Great Recession (Sept 15, 2008 the markets fell off a cliff and the paper came out two months later in November 2008) and fears of being tied to into a fiat nationalized currency.

I don't know if bitcoin/blockchain would have been as big a hit without coupling with the Great Recession, that at least gave bitcoin massive fuel. The Great Recession was 'good for bitcoin' as they say.

coupling with the Great Recession, that at least gave bitcoin massive fuel

Whatever fuel that contributed, it probably pales in comparison to the fuel contributed by Mark Karpeles' market manipulation at MtGox.

That's what really caught people's attention, and after that was when large scale VC money started to flow in, because the market manipulation and subsequent price spikes gave the impression that this was a growth market worthy of deploying capital into.

After the collapse of MtGox, and what was going on behind the scenes became apparent, you had lots of people with money invested under the false pretence of great interest and demand for this new thing.

So they had to decide were they going to take the loss, or pickup the torch from MtGox, and thus we got blockchain fever.

Whatever utility there is in blockchain crypto-currencies, the game to this point has been "Hey I'm gonna buy some of this stuff, then convince other people to do the same, because it is magic internet money! (please don't be too specific in your questions, or ask me to think if what I propose is actually workable)"

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