LONDON, July 8 — The technical reality of Bitcoin, now seventeen years into its existence, remains as elegantly stubborn as ever. The first decentralised cryptocurrency, conjured from the ether of the 2008 financial crisis by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, continues to operate on the principles laid out in a white paper published on October 31, 2008. The network itself launched on January 3, 2009, with the mining of the genesis block — block zero — which yielded a reward of 50 bitcoins.
That block, embedded with a headline from The Times about bank bailouts, set the tone for a project that has since become a half-trillion-dollar asset class. The detail that matters for anyone looking under the hood is the supply cap.
The total number of bitcoins that will ever exist is fixed at 21 million coins. By 2023, over 19.5 million of those had already been mined, meaning the vast majority of the supply is already in circulation. The remaining fraction will be released slowly over the next century or so, as block rewards continue to halve every four years.
This scarcity is baked into the code, not subject to the whims of central bankers.
The Pizza That Started It All
Bitcoin’s journey from obscure internet experiment to global financial instrument is littered with moments that now seem almost mythical. The first real-world transaction occurred on May 22, 2010, when a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. That day is now celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day, a wry reminder of the staggering appreciation that followed.
At the time, those coins were worth roughly $41. By November 2021, the same amount would have been worth nearly $690 million.
Bitcoin’s price reached parity with the US dollar for the first time in February 2011. From there, the trajectory was anything but linear. The asset peaked at nearly $69,000 in November 2021, a dizzying height that drew in institutional investors and retail speculators alike.
Then came the correction. By late 2022, the price had fallen to around $16,500, a brutal bear market that tested the conviction of even the most ardent believers.
As of 2024, the market capitalisation of Bitcoin stood at over $500 billion, a figure that places it among the largest assets in the world by that metric.
The Energy Question
Bitcoin mining relies on a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, a computationally intensive process that secures the network by requiring miners to solve complex mathematical puzzles. The energy cost of this security is substantial. As of 2022, the Bitcoin network was consuming an estimated 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually.
To put that in perspective, that is comparable to the entire energy consumption of Argentina. This figure has drawn criticism from environmentalists and regulators, though proponents argue that much of the mining uses renewable or stranded energy that would otherwise go to waste.
The legal status of Bitcoin varies sharply by jurisdiction. It is legal in most countries, but a handful of nations have taken a harder line. China and Algeria, for instance, have banned it outright.
The most notable experiment in state-level adoption came from El Salvador, which became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender on September 7, 2021. That move was met with both enthusiasm and scepticism, and its long-term effects are still being assessed.
As ever, the technical reality of Bitcoin is that it is a system designed to operate without trusted third parties. Whether that vision will continue to gain traction, or whether the regulatory and environmental headwinds will prove too strong, remains the open question. For now, the network ticks on, block by block, as it has done every ten minutes since January 2009.
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