Friday, January 3, 2020
by Sharon Moran
Bitcoin is the first and most well-known cryptocurrency and was first created on January 3, 2009, the day Satoshi Nakamoto mined the genesis block (block number 0). So how did Bitcoin become known as a cryptocurrency?
The word cryptocurrency actually was agreed upon in an email exchange between Satoshi Nakamoto and Martti Malmi. According to a book by Nathaniel Popper, in an email Satoshi sent to Martti Malmi he mentioned how a forum user referred to bitcoin as a cryptocurrency.
From the book Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money,
“Maybe it’s a word we should use when describing Bitcoin. Do you like it?” Satoshi asked.” “It sounds good,” Martti replied.
Obviously, the user was referring to the underlying cryptography that enables the peer-to-peer exchange capability of Bitcoin.
CoinMarketCap lists over 2400 cryptocurrencies! So that one term proposed over a decade ago–cryptocurrency— is now being used to describe thousands of currencies, not just Bitcoin. Whether or not Satoshi could have predicted a list of cryptocurrencies as long as what we see on CoinMarketCap today is uncertain, although it’s very likely he wasn’t even remotely concerned about the possibility.
While we are on the topic of Satoshi, in an upcoming article, I plan to reveal a potential, never-before-seen theory about who Satoshi Nakamoto might be. And if Bitcoin was created by the individual I’m claiming in the article, mass adoption of cryptocurrency will soon be a foregone conclusion because creating a peer-to-peer system of monetary exchange was not the end goal. It just the beginning of a much larger plan.
