On July 17, 2010, two trading parties matched for the first time on the Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange when 20 bitcoin changed hands for just under a dollar. The exact price of that first trade was $0.04951 per whole bitcoin.

Prior to the trade on Mt. Gox, real-world goods had been exchanged for Bitcoin, but the existence of an electronic matching venue changed the game. Finding a trading partner on an automated electronic exchange is far simpler than making forum posts or jumping into IRC rooms. In July 2010, real-time Bitcoin price discovery began in earnest.

The First Bitcoin Trade

The exact specifications of the first Bitcoin trade:

Time: 2010-07-17 23:09:17 UTC
Amount: 20.00000000 BTC
Price: $0.04951
Value: $0.9902

At that moment ten years ago, the height of the blockchain was 68,773, and the total issued supply of Bitcoin was 3,438,650. A quick multiplication places the market cap of Bitcoin at roughly $170,000 at the time of the first Mt. Gox trade.

If They Never Sold

Though it’s probably not the case, let’s assume for a moment that the buyer of those first coins on Mt. Gox held that 20 bitcoin until today, when the price is $9,109 per coin. The return on the dollar invested would be roughly 184,000×!

Looking back to these early prices and seeing that Bitcoin has gained in value by more than five orders of magnitude offers a bit of perspective to those impatient for further price appreciation. Too often, new Bitcoiners think they’re not early enough and they missed the boat. And every now and then, the value of Bitcoin rockets by another order of magnitude or two.

Bumps and Milestones Along the Way

Around two months after the first trade, Bitcoin had doubled to pass the 10 cent milestone on September 14, 2010. Not long thereafter, Bitcoin dropped a full 90% to reach is all-time low of $0.01 on October 8, 2010. One lucky buyer snagged a full 100 bitcoin for a penny each.

Dollar parity would not come until February 9, 2011. Bitcoin would trade at $10 on June 2, 2011, already up 1000× over its ultimate low nine months earlier.

My Journey

Shortly after Bitcoin reached $1.00 in February 2011, I learned about the project. At the time, I was interested in markets and trading, so I gravitated toward the free and open real-time market data coming from Mt. Gox. By the time I announced my first Bitcoin website on the forum in early June 2011, Bitcoin had already climbed past $10.

Over the intervening years, my projects have always had something to do with the market data side of Bitcoin. It wasn’t until the launch of my Dashboard that I presented network-level stats with the same real-time focus that I dedicated to market data projects.

The markets have matured, and now we have dozens of spot exchanges, regulated derivatives products, 100× leverage casinos, and auto-buy stacking apps. There are wallets for the streets and cash-only coordinators for private Bitcoin acquisition. In the middle of it all, there is free and open data. Without the free data feeds from exchanges and the blockchain, sites like mine would have taken much longer to appear. Certainly my first Bitcoin website wouldn’t exist.

The Road Ahead

Over the course of the last ten years, the market cap of Bitcoin has gone from $170k to $170B. We’ve crashed 90%, and we’ve rallied 100×. Each order of magnitude increase in price brings a new cohort of profit-seekers, skeptics, opportunists, scammers, entrepreneurs, developers, hobbyists, and folks who finally have to figure out what’s going on with that magic internet money. Somehow this thing never seems to die.

Each wave of volatility brings a new batch of memes, startups, hacks, bankruptcies, liquidations, and of course, Lamborghinis. Bitcoin’s nature as sound money means that the miners can’t simply increase output to meet increased demand, so I don’t predict we’ll see the end of volatility any time soon.

Whatever their reasons for learning about Bitcoin, each wave of adoption causes a small few to look past the promise of riches to start asking serious questions about the nature of money and the state. These conversations take years, but in the end, Bitcoin is showing people the way toward a sound money. And that could take us way beyond the Moon.

Ten years ago, Satoshi Nakamoto mined the Genesis Block of bitcoin. A few days later, he released the source code and other cypherpunks began extending the chain through proof-of-work mining. Today there are roughly 557,000 blocks, and the mining consensus continues to operate as intended. Around 17.5 million of the eventual 21 million bitcoins are in the circulating supply. The system has never been restarted.

For ten years, the world has known a decentralized source of truth. At all prior times in human history, we relied on centralized third parties to establish trust. Now everyone can independently verify the authenticity of their money via the Bitcoin blockchain.

The Bitcoin ecosystem has exploded, with thousands of exchanges, wallets, and services rising to meet consumer demands. As a base money settlement system, the blockchain is the anchor for a layered protocol topology. The Lightning Network exists atop the blockchain to provide a transactional layer and is growing exponentially in nodes, channels, and capacity.

True to form with other mass movements, Bitcoin has seen the rise of a new intellectual class. Authors, bloggers, economists, and podcasters are building a new theoretical base upon which to wage the war for hearts and minds. Unlike political movements, Bitcoin relies on persuasion and voluntary participation for growth. As the movement expands, it represents an ever-larger group of people choosing to opt-out of coercive monetary systems. The existence of Bitcoin has brought sound money and monetary inflation back into the discussion.

These past ten years might be the earliest days of a new golden era of human flourishing, built upon censorship-resistant, sound money.

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I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.

Thus Satoshi announced Bitcoin to the Cryptography mailing list on October 31, 2008.

The software code was two years in the making. The dream of digital cash was born decades earlier. Bitcoin unified multiple technologies with a sound monetary policy and economic incentives that punish rule-breakers. When the Genesis Block arrived in early 2009, Satoshi embedded within it a manifesto against the corruption of the global banking system:

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Ten years later there has been no revision of the whitepaper, no second edition. Satoshi has not been heard from since 2010. Yet the network he launched lives on, securing billions of dollars of real economic value without any meaningful down time. More importantly, Bitcoin has caused millions around the world to ask the question, “What is money?” Tugging on that thread of inquiry unravels the whole fiat monetary system. Eventually we ask a more dangerous question. Can we have money without the state?

With Bitcoin, I believe we can.

Space Economics

Space-based economies differ significantly from their Earthbound counterparts in a few critical ways. But just as the laws of celestial mechanics govern the motion of the heavens, the laws of economics guide the financial interactions of humans, no matter their location.

Thus far, human spaceflight has been dominated by government efforts, with resources allocated carefully by mission planners. In the Apollo days, a trip to the Moon offered the same per diem to the astronauts as an overnight in a motel (with deductions for accommodations aboard the spaceship). We shouldn’t expect significant economic activity in space until larger groups of people must allocate resources themselves. This article addresses some of the limitations of space economics and the opportunities for Bitcoin as we establish a toehold in space.

Mass Constraints

First and foremost, shipping costs to orbit are … astronomical. Recent efforts by our favorite space entrepreneur are driving down costs, but rocket launches may continue to be prohibitively expensive for decades. Non-rocket space launch systems hope to bring costs way down, but for now getting off the Earth is an expensive undertaking.

Immense launch costs partly explain the low population density of people in outer space. Humans are much less suited to spaceflight than computers. We require food, air, climate control, limited acceleration, and low radiation. So much mass and complexity comes with putting a person in space that it makes sense to send a robot instead and beam back pictures. However, once we have a more robust human presence in space, there will be commerce and economic calculation, so we can continue with our discussion.

In the face of mass limitations, allocating precious payload capacity to physical money like paper or gold makes no sense. As a digital money, Bitcoin was practically invented to power offworld commerce. Information is massless, and computers and communication equipment required to process digital payments would be in place regardless, serving other purposes critical to the mission. Bitcoin imposes additional overhead for block download and processing.

Orbital Mechanics

The scarcity of useful mass in space confines us to the most efficient orbits. This makes a trip to Mars feasible only every 26 months, though smart people are working on cheaper routes. Missions to the asteroids, Jupiter, and beyond require years of flight time barring the invention of alternate propulsion systems.

The long lead time turns the most trivial expenditure on Earth into an extreme luxury. Space settlements must depart with large numbers of replacement parts and spares for all critical systems, ingenious water recycling systems, and, eventually, some way to grow food. Once they arrive, the settlements must be able to produce goods with local resources, or they will rely forever on resupply missions from their Earth-side sponsor. Even Moon colonies, with their 3-day shipping time, require a rocket launch for supplies, and that takes planning.

Introducing long time delays into a supply chain makes advanced economic planning even more difficult and important. Systematic distortions of human time preference brought on by depreciating fiat money kick off the boom-and-bust of the business cycle. For offworld colonies, a large economic shock could be fatal. To that end, the interest rate should be left free to fluctuate according to the supply and demand for money, providing the best information to entrepreneurs making decisions about the future. A sound money like Bitcoin ensures interest rates are not artificially lowered by an increased money supply.

The Speed of Light Penalty

Information spreads no faster than light in vacuum, which means that a round-trip message between a space settlement and Earth will incur a minimum time penalty. The Moon is 384,400 kilometers away, and radio takes 1.28 seconds to travel that distance. Using the Internet with that latency would be possible but painful. With its eventual consistency and 10 minute block times, Bitcoin would work well enough on the Moon and in near-Earth space given adequate communication capacity. A lunar colony might even receive a new block before some nodes on Earth, due to long network propagation times through parts of the Internet.

In contrast, Mars oscillates between 3.1 and 22 light-minutes away. At those distances, a new delay-tolerant network architecture would be required to mitigate the lag. Mining Bitcoin on Mars would be unprofitable because of the propagation delay, assuming Earth maintains hash power dominance. The Martian miners would have a view of the blockchain up to 22 minutes out of date, so by the time their latest mined block reaches the majority of hash power on Earth, on average there would be four new blocks added to the chain. We can simulate mining on Mars today: simply mine on top of a block four deep in the blockchain. Extreme luck aside, the dominant mining planet will remain dominant across the solar system.

That is not to say that Bitcoin could not be used far from Earth. On the contrary, confirmation time simply becomes part of transaction planning, and second-layer solutions fill in the gap for payments. While physical goods transport incurs the cost of rocket launch and orbital transit time, transacting in digital goods happens at the speed of light. Offworld settlers could charge Earthlings for interesting data, such as scientific experiments or art inspired by the Moon. Bitcoin makes the exchange possible.

Space Cash

Space settlements will be entirely dependent upon their Earth-based sponsors potentially for decades, meaning that an independent economy might not arise for generations. However, fledgeling economies and offworld societies will need money one day, and a sound money would provide a stable bedrock for planning, investment, and growth. Bitcoin is the money that you beam across the galaxy.

Earth-orbiting colonies, space stations, and even Moon bases could operate on Bitcoin as surely as they will have access to the Internet. Wherever Bitcoin is used, verification of the blockchain is essential in order to prevent economic censorship of the settlement. Bitcoin nodes should ensure that more than one communication channel receives updates from Earth. Multiple independent node operators in each settlement improve the censorship resistance of the blockchain. Outgoing transactions should be transmitted over multiple channels back to Earth to resist economic blockade of the settlement.

Lightning for Payments

On-chain transactions require radio round trips and multiple confirmations before they can be trusted offworld. For payments far from Earth, the Lightning Network comes into its own. Payment channels are established on-chain, but further transactions are off-chain and local. Your payment for the newest experimental Martian coffee will be instant, private, and cheap.

A simple technical modification is required during channel setup to mitigate large time lags: adjust the time lock delta to account for a round trip to the blockchain. Martian settlers add 44 minutes, or 4 blocks. Colonists on Saturn’s moon Titan add 3 hours, or 18 blocks to the minimum time lock delta. Otherwise, payments will be local and instant while retaining all the properties of Lightning Network payments on Earth.

What about interplanetary Lightning channels? Enabling faster payments between worlds would be icing on the cake, but with the current protocol, Lightning may not be the best fit. Aside from the assumption that “transport is ordered and reliable,” node interactions are communication-heavy, with multiple round trips for certain operations. This is not to say that some other Layer 2 technology can’t fill the gap, or that Lightning could have a delay-tolerant mode. There will probably be secure bridges between Layer 2 networks, just as there are already services that go between on- and off-chain payments. Brilliant minds are refining and improving these protocols constantly, so there will probably be a solution to the time delay problem by the time we need interplanetary payments.

Should Bitcoin be used for all planets in the system? Do we need MarsCoin and MoonBux? Will Bitcoin go with colonists on missions to other stars? Later essays will discuss the viability of multiple blockchains for interplanetary trade and further implications for interstellar expansion.

The Interplanetary Frontier

The frontier offers the promise of a fresh start, and the settler spirit fuels perseverance in the face of immense challenge. As we embark on the journey to the stars, we need all the help we can get. Since the money of space settlement will be digital, we must leave behind the printing presses. Let’s also leave behind the distortions of unsound money and fuel the space economy with Bitcoin.

The effort was the community’s response to the refusal of miners to activate Segregated Witness, a much-needed upgrade and capacity increase for the Bitcoin network. Individual users began running patched versions of the Bitcoin Core software that would reject all blocks not signaling for SegWit after August 1, 2017.

The result was that SegWit activated on August 23, 2017.

The corporate-controlled SegWit2x project was an attempt to hard-fork the network to a larger base block size in exchange for activating SegWit. The effort was kicked off in the closed-door New York Agreement and was also cancelled by insiders. Ironically, nodes that continued to run the software halted due to a code error.

The UASF episode illustrates the difficulty of changing Bitcoin without widespread consensus among its users. If a less-important parameter like the block size cannot be forcibly changed, then we can be hopeful that the much more important properties of Bitcoin will remain intact.

Bitcoin is important because it provides an ultra-hard sound money alternative to central bank fiat paper, and it allows a global user base to transact without economic censorship. The monetary policy and censorship-resistance of Bitcoin are what make it interesting. Without these properties, Bitcoin becomes nearly useless.

Let’s celebrate Bitcoin’s independence as it continues to change the world.

Today, Futures gets a small but important upgrade with the addition of a live label on the chart. Below the market, I’ve added two percentage values: the premium over spot and the implied growth rate.

Contract Premium

The first percentage is simply the contract premium (or discount) over the index underlying that contract. BitMEX and OKEX maintain separate indices for settlement of their respective futures contracts.

Premium = 100 * (Contract Price / Index Price - 1)

Implied Growth Rate

The second number is the implied daily growth rate. Given the contract premium over the index and the number of days remaining until contract expiration, the implied growth rate is the daily compound return needed to arrive at the contract price.

Implied = 100 * ((Contract Price / Index Price)^(1 / Days) - 1)

Feedback

As always, please let me know how I can make the Futures page better.

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Technical Details

Index values are computed every 15 minutes, reflecting the slower speed of over-the-couter trades. Trades are both volume- and time-weighted, with larger and recent trades factoring more highly in the index value.

At time of launch, the Street Price is calculated for 16 global currencies: BRL, CNY, COP, EUR, GBP, INR, MXN, NGN, RUB, SAR, THB, TRY, UAH, USD, VEF, and ZAR. Index history goes back to the earliest trades available on OTC market APIs.

Future Work

The Street Price site has an overview page highlighting the tracked currencies, but the single-currency view is in the works. I also plan on launching a developer API page to enable wallets and other data sites to incorporate the data.

Other improvements include more global currencies and additional data sources for over-the-counter trades. Stay tuned for updates as this project is under active development.

Drop me a line with your comments and suggestions for improving the Street Price.

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With Tickers, you can see real-time trades from dozens of exchanges all on one chart. Never miss a moment of the wild Bitcoin markets!

Global Currencies

Tickers includes many price feeds of Bitcon trading against non-US Dollar currencies. These trades are converted to USD equivalent values according to the going FX rates from Open Exchange Rates.

One of the most interesting things about plotting many markets on one chart is the currency-specific groupings that develop. For instance, many of the CNY exchanges will cluster either higher or lower than the USD exchanges. These trends could indicate a change in local cultural psychology or a regulatory action, such as one country limiting fiat withdrawals.

Features

The most obvious feature of Tickers is the short timeframe: the maximum available is six hours of tick data. The tightest view plots data at one second per pixel.

With so many markets, there are sure to be outliers. So you can disable a market by clicking on its label in the left-hand listing.

I hope you enjoy using Tickers as much as I have! Let me know how I can make it better.

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