Twelve years ago, on October 31, 2008 (Halloween night!) A mysterious character called Satoshi Nakamoto published on the web a White Paper on an electronic currency capable of sending online payments directly from one entity to another without going from one entity to another. financial institution. Nakamoto (it is not yet known whether he is an individual or a group of researchers) baptized this coin, or rather cryptocurrency, with the name of bitcoin, which has come a long way since then. The first bitcoin was printed (it's not exactly exact but it is to keep the parallel with traditional currencies such as the dollar and the euro, called fiat) on January 3, 2009.

At first used by a few nerds, perhaps very skilled hackers but considered marginal characters, then by crime to carry out the worst criminal transactions on the dark web, bitcoin gradually made its entrance into the mainstream, until it rose to prominence in 2017 due to of the dizzying rise in prices that triggered a real gold rush especially among very young traders (first of all Asians).

That year bitcoin went from $ 1,000 in January to $ 20,000 in December. Then the bubble burst, causing bitcoin to plummet to $ 3,200 in the second half of 2018. Subjected to a carpet bombing by the media, watched over by regulatory authorities around the world, and disgusted by traditional finance (in May 2017 the number one of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, had called it "a scam"), bitcoin seemed destined for a miserable end. But incredibly, the hodlers (it's not a typo, that's what they say in jargon) kept their bitcoins in their wallet, animated a little by faith, a little by desperation (but many of them would say: with iron rationality) which prevented the cryptocurrency to go down to zero.

Since then began a slow, but not too much, ascent from the underworld, which today brought bitcoin back to $ 14,000, a threshold it hadn't touched since January 2018 and maintained for a short time, it's true. But in any case at 5 pm it was traveling at $ 13,842, a level that ensures a respectable gain of 44.7% compared to October 31, 2019. In fact, many things have changed this year. First of all, in May there was the halving, historically the prelude to big increases: in a nutshell, the cryptocurrency printing was halved. A fundamental trait of bitcoin is that it is not inflationable: a total of 21 million will be printed, those will be and those will remain forever (18.53 million have been printed so far). This is why it is called digital gold. And coincidentally, just a few days ago, a report by JP Morgan's Global Market Strategy division pointed out that bitcoin's long-term upside potential is considuous as it could compete with gold as an alternative currency. In just three years the opinion of the big American bank has therefore changed radically. But the real leap in quality was the announcement of PayPal, which from the beginning of next year will allow its 346 million customers to use bitcoin as a means of payment in the 26 million affiliated stores. All approved by the various regulatory authorities. As a Halloween joke it's not bad.