Bitcoin Celebrates 14th Birthday Next Week; What Lies Ahead?

In 2008, a white paper was published under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto titled: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.

The very next year, On Jan 3, Bitcoin was launched, and the genesis(first) block was mined. At that point, fifty bitcoins were created out of thin air and recorded in the blockchain (block zero). In the first block, Nakamoto wrote the headline from the UK newspaper The Times: “Chancellor on the verge of second bank bailout.”

Since its inception in 2009, Bitcoin has grown to become the world’s most well-known and popular cryptocurrency exchange, with over 190 million users worldwide.

Next week, the entire cryptocurrency industry will commemorate Bitcoin’s 14th birthday. However, 2022 was the year of the great crypto winter with market strokes, record price drops, regulations tightening, fraud and mismanagement incidents.

First, there was the spring collapse of Terra-Luna and the subsequent losses suffered by the crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which triggered a wave of bankruptcy filings. Now, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, has filed for bankruptcy after misusing customer funds.

This year’s events have shaken institutional investors who had been gradually warming to digital assets.

Despite this, millions of people around the world use Bitcoin for a wide range of purposes, and about 1 billion people around the world use cryptocurrencies in 2022.

As of November 2022, around 85 million people had created unique Bitcoin wallets on Blockchain.com, which is roughly 6 million users more than a year earlier and approximately 42 million more users than in 2019.

This year Bitcoin crossed over $100 trillion in cumulative transfer volume, with roughly $105 trillion having been settled on the network in total, says Will Clemente, Analyst at Reflexivity Research.

“This is a tremendous feat, illustrating how millions around the world have utilized Bitcoin as a global settlement network,” he added.

Historically, Bitcoin bull runs correspond to the four-year market cycle, which includes accumulation (buying), an uptrend, distribution (selling), and a downtrend. Experts believe that the accumulation phase of this process is expected to begin in 2023, though some believe it may be delayed until 2024. According to financial analysts, the global blockchain market will grow by $39.17 billion US dollars by 2025.