• Ethereum was the most meaningful of the ICOs (initial coin offering). Many other companies followed, such as NXT Neo, Spectrecoin that were often tied to specific businesses and products.
• In 2017, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (the money police) announced that financin...

In order to make your investment in bitcoin worthwhile, you have to convince others that the investment is valuable too.

• Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer money network. You don't have to pay a fee to a bank when you send money to another party.
• Bitcoin is finite. There can only be 21 million bitcoin in the world. More than 17 million have already been mined while the rest w...

Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange (Mt.Gox) launched a bitcoin exchange in 2010. It let people buy bitcoin and sell using bank transfers.

On January 3rd, 2009, a few months after the publication of the original whitepaper, the first lines of code were committed to the bitcoin blockchain by Satoshi Nakamoto. But Nakamoto vanished. No one has discovered who Satoshi was or is, though many have tried.

Despite Mt.Gox and the Silk Road, bitcoin continued to enter the mainstream. At the end of 2014, Microsoft began accepting bitcoin payments. In 2015, other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum - also based on the blockchain - began to emerge.

Bitcoin highlights how fundamentally bizarre money is. Money is a value token that makes exchange easier. It isn't real in a tangible way. But it's real enough that people fight and die for it.