In early December, bitcoin (BTC) reached the $100,000 level for the first time, which was expected by market participants over the past few years. And 12 years ago, the main cryptocurrency was worth a thousand times less and was just beginning to attract the attention of investors. It was the period of the formation of blockchain technology and the formation of the Bitcoin community.

In April 2013, the price of bitcoin for the first time exceeded $100 per coin, its total capitalization was only about $ 1 billion. At that time, it was traded on only a few exchanges, and buying BTC for large investors was an extremely problematic activity.

"I went to a startup called Coinbase and tried to buy 30,000 bitcoins. A pop-up window informed me that the daily limit is $50. I almost had a heart attack," Dan Morehead, founder of the first bitcoin fund Pantera Capital, recalls those days, commenting on the low liquidity in the markets.

(Dan Morehead)

This year, the largest exchange in the world was Japan's Mt. Gox, which accounted for over 70% of bitcoin trading volume. She subsequently suffered a series of break-ins and filed for bankruptcy in 2014.

As a result of the investigation, it was revealed that 850 thousand bitcoins were stolen, the value of which at the current exchange rate is more than $ 85 billion.

Morehead also noted that it was not accepted to invest in bitcoin in those years. Especially after the 87% collapse in early December 2013. And attracting investors to invest in bitcoin was accompanied by significant difficulties.

"The market was still falling more than three years later. By 2016, almost everyone had abandoned bitcoin. Investors showed no interest. I flew all over the world and held 170 meetings with investors that year. The result of all these efforts is that we were able to raise only $1 million. The management fee was $17,241. For $100 per meeting," Morehead wrote.

Mining

In 2009, when the bitcoin network was launched, mining was carried out on home computers. This means that any of the first users could receive tens, hundreds, or even thousands of bitcoins while sitting on a laptop. And since there were almost no other participants in the network, Satoshi could receive hundreds of thousands of bitcoins due to the simplicity of their extraction at that time.

The cryptocurrency infrastructure in 2013 was in its infancy. Bitcoin mining was carried out on home computers, and most network participants saw bitcoin as an experimental technology rather than a financial instrument.

Mining is a complex computational process for verifying the authenticity of bitcoin transactions. The mining process consists of confirming blocks with transactions and receiving a reward in the form of new bitcoins.

Those who participate in this process are called miners. They compete with each other in solving complex tasks of calculating the so-called hashes. For this work, miners receive rewards in bitcoin.

The first professional mining device was released at the end of 2013 by Bitmain. Just a year later, this led to a 700-fold increase in the network's hashrate to about 300,000 TH/s.

At the beginning of December 2024, this figure is 730 million TH/s, which is an increase of about 180 thousand. just from the launch of the first specialized bitcoin mining device, according to the Blockchain service.

Hashing rate, or hashrate, is a term that is used to measure the power of devices involved in cryptocurrency mining. The indicator determines the number of operations (hashes) per second that can be performed by mining equipment (H/s).

As the hashrate values increased, decimal prefixes began to be used: terahesh (TH/s), exahesh (EH/s), petahesh (PH/s) and others.

Using Bitcoin

One of the most high-profile events of 2013 was the closure of the Silk Road platform by the US authorities, which is an anonymous online platform where 70% of goods were made up of prohibited psychoactive substances.

Users were connected via the anonymous Tor network, and calculations were carried out in the bitcoin cryptocurrency. In 2012-2013, annual sales through Silk Road were estimated at $14-15 million.

However, bitcoin transactions were conducted mainly in small communities. In 2013, the first retail chain accepting cryptocurrency appeared, a chain of snack bars in Pennsylvania. But these examples were the exception rather than the rule.

Network usage for transfers in terms of the number of daily transactions was also at a low level. At the beginning of 2013, the number was about 20,000 per day, compared to more than 600,000 in early December 2024, according to Bitinfocharts.

In addition, there were practically no other cryptocurrencies on the crypto market. According to the Coinmarketcap archives, in April 2023, there were only seven projects on the list of the service that tracks prices for crypto assets.

For comparison, on December 5, the number of cryptocurrencies in the Coinmarketcap list exceeds 10 thousand. And the total number of issued cryptocurrencies that have been created by this time exceeds millions.

Only on the Pump platform.fun more than 4.3 million tokens have been created on the Solana blockchain, which allows you to create a token for a small fee.

It is also worth noting 2013 as the year of the beginning of the creation of new cryptocurrencies. That year, the first well-known Dogecoin memcoin was launched as an ironic response to the growing number of new cryptocurrencies. In 2024, in mid-November, this asset surpassed the capitalization of more than 60% of companies in the S&P500 index.

(Mike Novogratz)

"If Satoshi were alive, because I don't think he's alive, I'm sure he'd have a big smile on his face," said Mike Novogratz, head of Galaxy Digital investment bank, commenting on bitcoin's historic surge above the $100,000 mark for CNBC.

Novograd is known for his prediction that bitcoin will reach $500 thousand, as well as the purchase of about 500 thousand. ETH at $0.99 per coin at the end of 2015 from Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.

It is unknown if he still holds these crypto assets.

Galaxy Digital is one of the top 5 largest corporate holders of bitcoin - it owns 15,449 BTC, which at the current market value is estimated at about $1.5 billion.