The Bitcoin calendar

Satoshi Nakamoto mined the genesis block, block 0. Its first entry quotes that day’s London Times headline about a second bank bailout.

Satoshi released version 0.1 of the Bitcoin software and announced it on a cryptography mailing list.

Hal Finney, a cryptographer and one of the first people to run the software, posted two words that are still quoted today.

The SEC approved the first spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the United States. Trading began the next day.

In block 170, Satoshi sent 10 bitcoin to Hal Finney, the first transaction from one person to another.

Tesla disclosed that it had bought $1.5 billion of bitcoin.

For the first time, one bitcoin traded for one U.S. dollar.

Satoshi posted about Bitcoin on the P2P Foundation forum, describing money that needs no trusted third party.

The Tokyo exchange, once the largest, filed for bankruptcy after reporting about 850,000 bitcoin missing. Chapter 7 tells the story.

An executive order created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, holding bitcoin the federal government had seized rather than selling it.

As the pandemic hit markets, bitcoin lost more than a third of its price in a single day. It later recovered.

A beta release of Lightning software for real bitcoin went out, opening the fast road that Chapter 12 explains.

Executive Order 6102 required Americans to turn in most of their gold to the government. Satoshi later listed April 5 as a birthday, which many read as a nod to this day.

Coinbase, a bitcoin exchange, listed its shares on the Nasdaq stock market.

At block 840,000 the new bitcoin paid to miners fell from 6.25 to 3.125 per block. In U.S. time zones it was still the evening of April 19.

In an email to developer Mike Hearn, Satoshi wrote of having moved on to other things. It is one of the last messages anyone received.

At block 630,000 the new bitcoin per block fell from 12.5 to 6.25.

Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoin for two pizzas, the first known purchase of goods with bitcoin.

El Salvador’s legislature made bitcoin legal tender, the first country to do so.

A break-in at Mt. Gox sent its bitcoin price briefly to one cent. The ledger was fine. The company was not.

At block 420,000 the new bitcoin per block fell from 25 to 12.5.

Mt. Gox began trading bitcoin. It would become the largest exchange of its time.

Forty-four countries agreed to fix their currencies to the dollar, and the dollar to gold. Chapter 3 explains how it ended.

A group that wanted bigger blocks copied the ledger and started a separate coin. The original network kept its rules.

Thieves took about 120,000 bitcoin from the Bitfinex exchange. They took keys from a company, not bitcoin from the network.

MicroStrategy, now called Strategy, announced its first bitcoin purchase, 21,454 coins, and many public companies followed.

President Nixon ended the dollar’s link to gold. From then on, other countries could no longer trade their dollars for U.S. gold.

A software bug let one block create 184 billion bitcoin. Developers fixed it within hours, and the network dropped the bad block. Chapter 7 calls it the one early exception.

The domain name bitcoin.org was registered, more than two months before the whitepaper appeared.

At block 481,824 an upgrade called Segregated Witness took effect, making room for more transactions and paving the way for Lightning.

Hal Finney, who received the first bitcoin payment, died of ALS at 58. His body was preserved by cryonics, as he had planned.

El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law took effect. In 2025 the country made accepting bitcoin voluntary.

The FBI seized the Silk Road website. Its bitcoin trail, on a public ledger, helped convict its founder.

A site called New Liberty Standard published the first exchange rate: $1 bought 1,309.03 bitcoin, based on the cost of the electricity to mine them.

Bitcoin reached a record of about $126,000. Chapter 6 covers what came after.

The first U.S. fund holding bitcoin futures began trading on the stock market.

Satoshi Nakamoto sent a nine-page paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” to a cryptography mailing list.

Bitcoin reached about $69,000, a high that held for more than two years.

The FTX exchange collapsed with customer money inside. Customers who held their own keys lost nothing to it.

At block 709,632 the Taproot upgrade took effect, adding privacy and flexibility to how coins can be locked.

At block 210,000 the new bitcoin per block fell from 50 to 25 for the first time.

Satoshi asked WikiLeaks not to accept bitcoin yet, saying the young project could not survive the attention.

One bitcoin passed $100,000 for the first time.

The Cboe exchange in Chicago began trading bitcoin futures, the first on a major U.S. exchange.

Satoshi posted on the Bitcoin forum for the last time, about a technical fix. A few emails followed, then silence.

A forum member, a little drunk, misspelled “holding” during a price drop. The typo became a strategy.

President Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act. Chapter 3 starts the dollar’s story here.