Hey guys,
to keep track of important milestones of the cryptocurrency space, I included the following list in one of my new crowdsourced projects:
October 31, 2008
The Bitcoin whitepaper gets published by Satoshi Nakamoto.1
January 3, 2009
The Bitcoin network goes live.2
The genesis block contained the following:
“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”
May 22, 2010
Laszlo Hanyecz buys two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin (BTC) worth around $25 at that time.3
February 9, 2011
Bitcoin reaches $1 for the first time.
April 18, 2011
Namecoin, the first altcoin, is announced to the community.26 The underlaying purpose is the decentralization of domain registration.
October 13, 2011
Litecoin is launched by Charlie Lee as a fork of the original Bitcoin client.25 Various changes are made, including a change in the hashing algorithm. Litecoin becomes the first successful cryptocurrency that uses Scrypt, making it attractive for GPU-mining. (Scrypt is initially introduced by a project called Tenebrix, which dies shortly after launch.)27
August 19, 2012
Sunny King introduces Peercoin (PPC) and the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm.189
November 28, 2012
The first “halving” occurs.
The block reward is reduced from 50 to 25 BTC.4
July 31, 2013
The first crowdfunding project to be considered an ICO is launched. The project called Mastercoin collects over 5,000 BTC worth around $0.5 million at that time.21
September 28, 2013
A new open-source project called NXT is announced to the bitcointalk community. The project is based on a totally new codebase using solely the PoS consensus mechanism.34 The ICO raises a total of 21 BTC. During the genesis block, all one billion coins are distributed to seventy-three addresses.35 Since 1 NXT is valued more than $2 in late 2017, participation in the ICO results in an unimaginable ROI of far more than 10,000,000% considered to be by far the highest rewarding ICO of all time.
November 28, 2013
Bitcoin breaks 1,000$ for the first time.5
December 8, 2013
Dogecoin is launched. Initially started as a joke based on the “Doge” meme of the Shiba Inu dog breed, it becomes tremendously successful in the community. Despite the lack of innovation, it is still a very well-known currency.28
January 18, 2014
DASH (formerly known as Darkcoin), the first coin to introduce Masternodes, goes online.23, 24 Masternodes are introduced to enable different features (e.g., governance or anonymous transactions).
January 23, 2014
Ethereum (ETH) is announced by Vitalik Buterin.15 In the subsequent ICO, 2,000 ETH are sold for 1 BTC in the early phase of the crowdsale.16 Around $18 million are raised.17
February 24, 2014
The leading Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox goes bankrupt due to a hack resulting in more than 750,000 BTC stolen.6
April 18, 2014
Monero (XMR) goes live. The open-source project aims to be a fungible and untraceable form of payment. Privacy and a high level of security is therefore the main focus of the project. Monero is built with the use of the CryptoNight algorithm first introduced by Bytecoin (BCN).33
May 31, 2015
NEM, a totally new peer-to-peer crypto platform is launched after being announced in 2014. Different new features like the Proof-of-Importance algorithm (POI), delegated harvesting, or multisignature are introduced.38, 40 All coins are initially distributed during the launch of the genesis block, sometimes referred as “nemesis.” The majority of XEM, which is the native currency of the platform, are distributed to around three thousand stakeholders. The high number of original stakeholders leads to a very equal and broad distribution of coins, minimizing the risk of price manipulation.39
December 21, 2015
The official crowdsale of the IOTA project ends, collecting around 1,300 BTC.36 The project’s main target is the Internet-of-Things (IOT), enabling feeless microtransactions and data integrity of machines.37 It is the most famous project utilizing DAG (Direct Acyclic Graph). Other well-known projects utilizing DAG include NANO and Byteball.
July 6, 2016
The second halving resulting in a decrease to 12.5 BTC per block. The next halving to 6.25 BTC per block is expected to happen in mid-2020. The last block reward is estimated to take place in the year 2140.4, 7
July 20, 2016
The Ethereum blockchain splits as a result of a hard fork leading to Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). (The split was the result of an ongoing discussion how to handle an exploit of the DAO project. The DAO project was an approach for a decentralized autonomous organization receiving a high amount of funding. People favoring immutability and the concept of “code is law” were against the hard fork to restore the stolen user funds.18, 19) As a result of the fork, every ETH receives the equal amount of ETC.
August 2, 2016
Bitfinex, one of the largest exchanges at that time, is hacked. Around 120,000 BTC are stolen.8
June 22, 2017
The Antshares project, which held an ICO in mid-2016, is officially rebranded to NEO.29 More than 6,100 BTC are initially collected.30 Due to its focusing on smart contracts, the platform is often considered to be the major Ethereum competitor. GAS, NEO’s alternate token, is generated proportionally to the amount of NEO the user holds.31 It can be seen as dividend and is used to deploy smart contracts, ICOs or DApps.32
July 14, 2017
The record-breaking ICO of Tezos ends, collecting more than 65,000 BTC and 360,000 ETH.22
August 1, 2017
Bitcoin splits. After years of discussion on the best way to scale the Bitcoin network, the original chain forks, leading to Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Bitcoin integrates a technical innovation called Segregated Witness (Segwit), while BCH favores the approach of increasing the block size from 1MB to 8MB. Every Bitcoin holder at the time of the fork, is granted with the equal amount of BCH.9
November 28, 2017
Bitcoin breaks $10,000 for the first time.10
December 17, 2017
Bitcoin establishes a new all-time high close to $20,000.10
April 1, 2018
Ethereum reaches $1,000 for the first time.20
January 13, 2018
About 80 percent of all Bitcoins are already mined (16.8–21 million).14
March 12, 2018
The number of active Lightning Nodes surpasses 1,000.11 Lightning is a new approach to scaling the Bitcoin network and enabling various functions, including micropayments.12, 13
June 1, 2018
The EOS ICO ends after running for about a year. With a collected amount of more than $4 billion, EOS is the highest funded project in the crypto sphere.17
If you think some major event is missing, feel free to share!
Besides that, you could contribute and edit the book directly as well (Page 19):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1klLGovZDOJ-UzrEHE6chXJzOFiSJgWO_XS_EHAFqmcc/edit#The whole project can be accessed via:
https://coined1.com/Note: the numbers above relate to the reference section at the end of the book. It would be great if you can add respective links/ sources for major milestones as well
