Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies - Peter Kent, Kiana Danial - Страница 72

An entity called Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin. Satoshi claimed to be a man living in Japan, born on April 5, 1975. Kiana was actually living in Japan, completing her studies in electrical engineering in Tokyo, when Bitcoin hit the scene. Bitcoin wasn’t really a big thing in Japan at that time. That’s why most speculation about the true identity of Satoshi points to a number of cryptography and computer science experts of non-Japanese descent living in the United States and various European countries.

But Satoshi’s anonymity isn’t really a big deal, because Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies, for that matter) is supposed to be open source and decentralized, as we explain in Chapter 2 of this minibook. In fact, according to Bitcoin.org, no single person or entity “owns the Bitcoin network much like no one owns the technology behind email.” Bitcoin users around the world control Bitcoin, with the developer improving the software and the forkers making some radical changes. However, the main idea behind Bitcoin and Bitcoin’s protocol can’t be changed.

In mid-April 2011, Bitcoin’s market cap was about $6 million. In April 2021, the market cap was over a trillion dollars. If you had bought 1 Bitcoin for $2 in November 2011 (something Kiana’s investor friends told her to do that she ignored), your single Bitcoin would have been worth $64,000 in April 2021. Of course, many initial investors bought more than one Bitcoin at the time, which is exactly how all those Bitcoin millionaires were made. If you had bought 100 Bitcoins in November 2011 for a paltry sum of $200, by April 2021 they would have been worth $12.8 billion!

But by the time everyone started talking about Bitcoin, it went crashing down to around $120 billion and stayed there for most of 2018. It maintained its number one ranking among all other cryptocurrencies, though. The main reason behind this position may have been that most people had heard a lot (relatively speaking) about Bitcoin but not so much about other cryptocurrencies. So even though they had several hundred other altcoins to choose from, even some that may have been better long-term alternatives to Bitcoin, most newbies who wanted to get involved in the market started out with Bitcoin.

Another reason for Bitcoin’s huge market cap is its accessibility. It’s pretty safe to say that all cryptocurrency exchanges (see Book 5, Chapter 3) carry Bitcoin. But not all exchanges list all altcoins, at least for now.