The birth of Bitcoin and its early days Satoshi Nakamoto and the whitepaper

In 2008, an anonymous person or group of people known as Satoshi Nakamoto released a white paper entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. In this paper, Nakamoto outlined a new digital currency that would be powered by a decentralized network of computers, with no central authority figure.

The following year, Nakamoto released the first version of Bitcoin's software and mined the first block of Bitcoin, known as the genesis block. The first transaction in Bitcoin's history was between Nakamoto and developer Hal Finney, in which Nakamoto sent 10 bitcoins to Finney.