The Ghost of Crypto Past
Barring any more crypto zaniness this week, bitcoin will likely be trading around $17,000 on Christmas morning.
Ethereum will be humming along at $1,200, or so, and crypto's entire market capitalization will sit somewhere in the region of $850 billion.
It's been a terrible year. And an incredible decade.
Zoom out, my friends, as the Ghost of Crypto Past takes you on a journey back in time…
December 25, 2012
The price of Bitcoin is $13.40.
The price of Ethereum is — oh wait, don't let me spoil the surprise. There's this kid in Toronto, he's about 18, and, boy, does he know how to code. But we'll get to that.
There's no Binance. There's no CoinMarketCap. There are no smart contracts, no NFTs, there's no DeFi, no stablecoins. It's kinda barren out there.
The Harry Potter movie series (finally) finished up last year: The top film of this year? Marvel's The Avengers.
December 25, 2013
The price of Bitcoin is $707.30.
The price of Ethereum is … nope, still early. The bright Canadian lad is working at Bitcoin Magazine.
The Silk Road has just been shut down, and its founder, Ross Ulbricht, is awaiting trial. The term 'hodl' first passes into the English language. Bitcoin's best friends include Ashton Kutcher and Bill Gates. Dogecoin makes its illustrious debut.
NCIS is the top-rated TV show in the US this year.
December 25, 2014
The price of Bitcoin is $319.
The price of Ethereum is … look, he's still working on it. Give him a minute.
The world's largest crypto exchange, Mt. Gox, blows up, taking with it some 650,000 bitcoins (almost $11 billion today and $473 million then). But, on the plus side, Microsoft begins accepting BTC payments, and Tether is launched as "RealCoin."
Taylor Swift tops the US charts with her fifth album, 1989; she's been recording since before Bitcoin hit the scene.
December 25, 2015
The price of Bitcoin is $454.
The price of Ethereum is $0.87.
Ethereum rolls out its first iteration, dubbed Frontier: One ETH trades under a dollar for the whole of 2015. New York introduces its first bid to regulate crypto companies, BitLicense, while Coinbase raises $75 million in a Series C. Peercoin, MaidSafeCoin, and BitShares are all top 10 cryptocurrencies.
Hamilton premieres in Manhattan early this year.
December 25, 2016
The price of Bitcoin is $891.10.
The price of Ethereum is $7.23.
Ethereum's first big decentralized app, The DAO, is hacked. Which is why we have Ethereum Classic today — to appease the true believers of code is law. Chinese bitcoin miner Chandler Guo suggests a $10,000 price for one bitcoin will not be impossible. 119,754 bitcoins are stolen from Bitfinex, and, six short years later, a couple in Manhattan would learn that laundering BTC is actually harder than laundering cash.
In other news, Donald Trump loses the US popular vote by almost 3 million votes and becomes president anyway.
December 25, 2017
The price of Bitcoin is $13,833.50.
The price of Ethereum is $709.81.
People become jolly excited about ICOs, with the crowdfunding mechanism pulling in around $3.8 billion, unevenly distributed between thousands of grifts, and a couple of projects with actual promise.
Paris Hilton, Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled get involved in promoting crypto. Bitcoin forks, and Bitcoin Cash briefly looks like it might win the Fork Wars (it did not). A cryptocurrency called Verge soars 1,581,942% to a whopping $0.30; it's now worth $0.002. CBOE and CME begin trading bitcoin futures. Binance is founded.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle get engaged. Good for them.
December 25, 2018
The price of Bitcoin is $3,762.50.
The price of Ethereum is $128.39.
It's officially Crypto Winter. The Original and Best. Cryptoassets are down 80%.
Triumphant no-coiners proclaim the end of crypto, and — as usual — they are wrong. Joe Lubin's ConsenSys introduces Civil, trumpeted as the future of journalism. It wasn't, but he goes on to try again with Decrypt, which launches in the same year as Blockworks (Hey, that's us!) and The Block.
The ERC-721 standard for NFTs launches on Ethereum, and a CryptoKitty sells for $140,000. Uniswap is deployed on Ethereum, too.
K-pop becomes a thing.
December 25, 2019
The price of Bitcoin is $7,224.80.
The price of Ethereum is $125.24.
Facebook unveils Libra, which will supposedly transform payments. It doesn't.
Decentralized Finance — DeFi — becomes crypto's bright new hope, as MolochDAO launches and InstaDapp emergers from a two-day hackathon in India. Yes, you have to read this far to get to DeFi.
Canadian exchange Quadriga becomes the center of one of crypto's most bizarro stories, in which the founder is alleged by some to have faked his own death. We still don't really know what actually happened.
FTX starts facilitating trades, and rival Binance's CZ explains that, "With their backgrounds as professional traders, we see quite a bit ourselves in the FTX team and believe in their potential in becoming a major player in the crypto derivatives markets." Emphasis added, apropos of nothing.
December 25, 2020
The price of Bitcoin is $24,689.60.
The price of Ethereum is $626.93.
PayPal dives into crypto, the Bahamas introduce a CBDC (and China starts testing their own), and the SEC sues Ripple — the ultimate regulatory mic-drop as Jay Clayton leaves the building.
DeFi's total value locked (TVL) explodes from $675 million to $16 billion, and anybody who buys crypto (really, almost any crypto) in mid-March after COVID-19 officially becomes a pandemic probably retires soon enough. Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy spends almost a billion dollars on bitcoin. The Fed hits quantitative easing hard — money printer goes brrr — printing lots of free money to give to… well, everyone, which absolutely and positively cannot conceivably lead to runaway inflation later on.
Elon Musk starts tweeting about Dogecoin. This will end well.
December 25, 2021
The price of Bitcoin is $50,406.40.
The price of Ethereum is $4,093.14.
China bans all cryptocurrency transactions, Tesla decides to accept bitcoin (and then doesn't), and BTC hits a trillion dollar market cap. El Salvador makes Bitcoin its legal tender, and Canada launches a couple of bitcoin ETFs. NFT trading jumps to almost $2.6 billion in one month on OpenSea, and Beeple sells an NFT for $69 million. (Fun fact: Your narrator once got into a bidding war with the guy who bought that. He lost.)
We all want to #FreeBrittney, and Brittney is finally freed.
And now, 2022
Zoom out. A decade ago, the crypto industry was still an inkling. You didn't read about it in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Your cab driver didn't ask about Dogecoin. SBF was still a teenager.
A lot can happen in a decade. A lot will happen in the next one.
And as my friend, the Ghost of Crypto Future can testify… most of it will be good.
Stick around. Keep building.
2022 was not the best year for our industry… but 2023 will be better.
Wishing you and your family a happy holiday season, however and whatever you celebrate.
No comments:
Post a Comment