Bitcoin's origin story, explained: the 2008 whitepaper, the famous pizza purchase, and what actually made it different.

Originally reported as: “Pseudonymous developer publishes peer-to-peer electronic cash proposal online”

On October 31, 2008, a person or group using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a short whitepaper describing Bitcoin, a form of digital money that could be sent directly between people without a bank or any central authority in the middle. Earlier attempts at digital cash had failed to solve a core technical problem, preventing the same digital token from being copied and spent twice, without relying on a trusted central party to check. Bitcoin's proposed solution, a public, shared ledger maintained by a decentralized network of computers, became known as the blockchain. The first bitcoins were created in January 2009, and the currency had no established market value for over a year, until, in what's now celebrated annually as Bitcoin Pizza Day, a programmer paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas on May 22, 2010, one of the first times bitcoin was used to purchase something in the real world.