On-chain analysis (the "Patoshi Pattern") suggests roughly 1.1 million BTC (about 5% of the supply cap), mined in 2009-2010, remains unspent and is statistically attributed to a single early miner believed to be Satoshi Nakamoto. This is an estimate, not confirmed ownership.
Hal Finney was a cryptographer who received the first Bitcoin transaction (10 BTC) from Satoshi Nakamoto on January 12, 2009. He developed RPOW in 2004, was known for the "Running bitcoin" tweet, and died of ALS on August 28, 2014.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a cryptocurrency that split from Bitcoin on August 1, 2017. The split was driven by a scaling dispute over the roughly 1MB block size cap, with BCH choosing to enlarge blocks to raise throughput.
Bitcoin Pizza Day (May 22) commemorates the first real-world Bitcoin payment: in 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC, worth roughly $41 at the time.
Mt. Gox was the world's largest Bitcoin exchange of its time until it lost roughly 850,000 BTC and collapsed in 2014. It showed the world the risk of leaving coins on an exchange and helped launch Japan's crypto regulation; creditor repayments began in July 2024.
SegWit (Segregated Witness) was an upgrade added to Bitcoin in August 2017. It separated signature data to effectively boost capacity and fixed transaction-ID malleability. Implemented as BIP141, it became the foundation for the Lightning Network.
The whitepaper, 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,' was published by Satoshi Nakamoto on 31 October 2008. It showed how to prevent double-spending without a central authority and became the origin of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's history: the 2008 whitepaper, the 3 Jan 2009 genesis block, 2010 pizza day, the 2014 Mt. Gox collapse, the 2017 SegWit/BCH fork, 2021 Taproot and El Salvador, and 2024's US ETFs and halving.
