Some fun info, since everyone loves to learn!
Some of the things Satoshi picked were just educated guesses,
My choice for the number of coins and distribution schedule was an educated guess.
It was a difficult choice, because once the network is going it's locked in and we're stuck with it.
I wanted to pick something that would make prices similar to existing currencies, but without knowing the future, that's very hard.
I ended up picking something in the middle.
If Bitcoin remains a small niche, it'll be worth less per unit than existing currencies.
If you imagine it being used for some fraction of world commerce, then there's only going to be 21 million coins for the whole world, so it would be worth much more per unit.
Values are 64-bit integers with 8 decimal places, so 1 coin is represented internally as 100000000. There's plenty of granularity if typical prices become small.
For example, if 0.001 is worth 1 Euro, then it might be easier to change where the decimal point is displayed, so if you had 1 Bitcoin it's now displayed as 1000, and 0.001 is displayed as 1
On the initial release of Bitcoin,
In August of 2008 the domain name bitcoin.org was registered anonymously through anonymousspeech.com, which is the email SN used to communicate with others.
Around this time SN contacted others such as Adam Back and Wei Dai and Hal Finney and suggested they read a pre-release to the white paper. No copies of this pre-release (other than the abstract) are known to exist, the most likely candidate for keeping a copy was the late Hal Finney.
The abstract of this pre-release does not include the word bitcoin but instead this proposed white paper says Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party
On October 31st, 2008 SN published the white paper on Bitcoin to a mailing list for cryptography through metzdowd.com. He later says he created the code before writing the white paper.
On November 9th the project is registered on SourceForge.net, a website used for open source software at the time. Sourceforge has since garnered a poor reputation, the Bitcoin code is currently hosted on GitHub. GitHub allows software developers to work together with ease, very helpful on open source projects.
The P2P foundation profile of him (SN) states he was in 2009 a 37 year old male who lived in Japan. By monitoring what date the age changed on his profile a birthday of April 5th 1975 was found.
On April 5th 1933 FDR signed an order outlawing US citizens from holding gold, on January 6th 1975 sales of gold in the US were made legal again.
Jan 3, 2009: The Genesis Block is mined. Satoshi would wait another 6 days until Jan 9th to release the first version of the client, 0.1, to others.
Included in the coinbase data for the Genesis block is the message, The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.
The first transaction happened on the 12th between SN and Hal Finney.
In October of 2009 the first exchange rate was established based on electricity costs to run miners at the time, $1 in electricity could be used to mine roughly 1,300 btc. That is 0.000769 cents per btc.
The first update, a release to version 0.2 and the first difficulty increase happened December 30th 2009 from 1 to around 1.1829. Within the next year the difficulty would rise to over 1,000.
SN contributed to the network for around a year. His last public post was on December 12th 2010 just a day after posting, ... WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.
Excellent timeline, thanks for sharing!
