The development of Bitcoin: from Satoshi Nakamoto to the present day

Bitcoin was created and presented in a whitepaper in 2008, as a response to the global financial crisis of the time, by Satoshi Nakamoto, whose real identity remains unknown. In addition to presenting his idea in the form of a whitepaper, he also wrote the code for the first version of Bitcoin. In other words, he showed in practice that his idea worked.

The first version of the Bitcoin code was not very elegant and only worked on Windows. As time went by, more programmers became interested in Bitcoin, and so new contributors began to emerge. In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz, known for buying two pizzas for 10 thousand bitcoins, was responsible for adding support for MacOS.

Satoshi Nakamoto's farewell

Shortly after, Gavin Andresen began contributing to the code and gained prominence for it. More people began contributing and then Satoshi Nakamoto decided to "disappear from the map". In his last appearance, he said: "I'm working on other things. Bitcoin is in good hands with Gavin and everyone." From that moment until today, Bitcoin has been developed and maintained by the community. Many volunteers frequently contribute to the source code. And now there are organizations that pay these developers, allowing them to dedicate themselves full-time to developing Bitcoin. These organizations receive donations from individuals and companies around the world and use this money to give "grants" to programmers who dedicate themselves to Bitcoin-related projects. Many programmers decide to contribute to Bitcoin-related open source projects for the purpose of doing so, that is, because they truly believe in Bitcoin and would like to contribute to its future. However, this is not the only reason. $BTC #nakamoto