On this day 11 years ago, the late Hal Finney made the first tweet about Bitcoin after he received the first Bitcoin transaction from its anonymous creator “Satoshi Nakamoto”. This, among other reasons, led people to believe he was the person behind the pseudonym.
Bitcoin has since grown in popularity and today, it’s trending on Twitter because after what was essentially a rocket ride on its way past $40k/BTC, the coin has dipped and hit a low of $32k – which is still pretty high considering that as of November 1, 2020, it was trading at about $14k.
This new dip is the lowest it has been since it hit $29k on the 4th of January. With dips like this, there’s usually a script to how things play out on social media and that’s what’s happening now.
First, the later adopters of the coin – usually people who bought when they heard of its leap to more than $38k – will start to panic and wonder if they somehow made a mistake. With this panic comes conversations – and that’s how things trend.
Then there are the people who have had bitcoin for a while and have watched it dip before and their general attitude during these times is usually:
However, with this particular dip, some early adopters are not as confident in the coin, likening the situation to the crash that followed the peak of 2017.
For those who are curious about cryptocurrency, here is a FactSheet published late last year by our own Alex, he says of bitcoin technology “…what a user needs to know is that no central authority controls its flow. Every cryptocurrency has a decentralised ledger that records each transaction.”
Nigerian startup Buycoins also provides a very simple course that helps a new adopter understand the workings of the crypto world.
In addition to Bitcoin, there are several other cryptocurrencies that exist in the market and are currently trading at various levels*. Notable among them; Ethereum at $1k/ETH, Litecoin at $130/LTC, and Ripple at $0.27/XRP.
A recent decision by the United States government allowing banks to make payments with stable coins points to a growing trust among governments and could see cryptocurrency gain more footing as legal tender in several countries in the coming years.
So on this anniversary of the first crypto transaction and standing at the precipice of what could be a huge bitcoin fall, we look to the future in hopes that we will still be ‘running bitcoin’ many years from now.
*The numbers in this article are at the time of publishing
