Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies онлайн

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Ranking number one on the list, Bitcoin was developed in 2008. As of September 2021, Bitcoin’s market cap is around $951 billion.

But Satoshi’s anonymity isn’t really a big deal, because Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies, for that matter) is supposed to be open source and decentralized, as we explain in ssss1 of this minibook. In fact, according to Bitcoin.org, no single person or entity “owns the Bitcoin network much like no one owns the technology behind email.” Bitcoin users around the world control Bitcoin, with the developer improving the software and the forkers making some radical changes. However, the main idea behind Bitcoin and Bitcoin’s protocol can’t be changed.

In mid-April 2011, Bitcoin’s market cap was about $6 million. In April 2021, the market cap was over a trillion dollars. If you had bought 1 Bitcoin for $2 in November 2011 (something Kiana’s investor friends told her to do that she ignored), your single Bitcoin would have been worth $64,000 in April 2021. Of course, many initial investors bought more than one Bitcoin at the time, which is exactly how all those Bitcoin millionaires were made. If you had bought 100 Bitcoins in November 2011 for a paltry sum of $200, by April 2021 they would have been worth $12.8 billion!