To understand where this world of cryptoactives came from and more specifically Bitcoin, we have to look back to the 2008 global financial crisis. After analyzing the facts, it is very difficult to dissociate these two events: the end of confidence in the financial system and the birth of Bitcoin.
In just 3 months, between August and October 2008, the Bitcoin.org website was created, the investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, the US government invested $ 700 billion in a program to support the financial system and Satoshi Nakamoto launched a white paper - technical document - in which he founded Bitcoin and the basis for blockchain technology.
If, on the one hand, we witnessed the collapse of centenary institutions based on trust and based on ethics, on the other hand a revolutionary technology was born, based on numerical calculations independent of human emotions.
The Economic Crisis of 2008 had as a catalyst an irresponsible credit system - attributed to people with no capacity to liquidate them - called subprime. Banks lent money to people to buy their home, without checking whether they were able to repay the loans. As everyone was able to access credit, demand increased and a bubble in American real estate was created. Then the banks added several high-risk credits in “bundles” - called bonds - sold as unique assets to other banks and institutions, without it being possible to know the assets and mortgages that were inside, due to the complexity purposely conferred on those bonds . In turn, these institutions sold them on the financial markets, with promises of high profitability. Here they were bought by private investors and governments from around the world. This scheme of buying and selling credits was intended to mask and transfer the risk of the money invested to others. The development of this process has created very strong links between credits, banks and governments. Due to these successive associations, and, since the initial loans were irresponsible and, even more irresponsible, the way the banks aggregated and masked them, when these people were unable to repay the credits created a catastrophic snowball effect that it has become too heavy for banks to handle.
When banks fell, they dragged millions of people, businesses and even countries into bankruptcy. At the end of the crisis, more than 15 million people worldwide had lost their jobs. In an attempt to save their economies, several countries nationalized financial and credit institutions, injecting more than 1.17 billion euros, in the Euro zone alone, out of the taxpayers' pockets and which further aggravated the economic conditions of society. These drastic changes in the lives of so many people and so suddenly broke the trust that society had in the financial system.
Due to the complexity of this topic, this explanation may be too simplistic. For a better understanding of the 2008 crisis, visit the Wikipedia page that explains it in detail.
On October 31, 2008, just 6 weeks after the bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, Satoshi Nakamoto published the technical document that would be the foundation of Bitcoin and where are the foundations for blockchain technology. In that document is the phrase: "We proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust." With this sentence, Satoshi revealed to be aware of the promiscuity of the financial system and created something to fill the need to eliminate human emotions from the control of society's money.
To release his paper, Satoshi sent it to a list of cryptographers' email addresses - The Cryptography Mailing List - where subscribers were interested in cryptography and its applications. Cryptography is the practice and study of secure forms of communication, “in code”, to prevent them from being deciphered by third parties. It was from here that the world became aware of this new technology and here that the first followers of Satoshi appeared.
Aware that a solution to the political problems in cryptography would not be found, Satoshi sought to create a safe territory by creating a decentralized system that governments could not attack by destroying a central point of control. To achieve this goal, it launched the Bitcoin base code on SourceForge.net, a website that specializes in providing conditions for the development of open-source software - a public system in which anyone can review, participate and help in the development and implement improvements.
After making it a public network, the first information that Satoshi recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain, was: “The Times 03 / Jan / 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout of banks.” He was referring to the headline in the British newspaper The Times that spoke of the hypothesis that at that date the government of that country would have to help more banks financially so that they did not collapse. The choice of this headline demonstrates the wish that we never forget what we suffered during that economically troubled period, which caused social fractures that we still feel today. It was with her that Satoshi demonstrated a powerful feature of the blockchain: the ability to store information transparently without changing it.
Nine days later, the first transaction ever made between Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney - a Bitcoin pioneer who helped in its development and was on the initial list of critographers who received the paper. And, in September 2009, the first exchange rate established, according to which 1309 bitcoin would be needed to reach the value of 1 US dollar. This dollar today would be worth more than 13 million dollars!
The foundations were laid for an alternative distributed, cryptographic and immutable financial system. Born out of the ashes of confidence in the global financial system whose destruction has caused suffering to countless people and has led them to adopt an incorruptible alternative.
Bitcoin was born.
