[Posted on reddit's /r/buttcoin on 20120-06-01] Well, not much happened, Here are some I can mention from the top of my mind: + In late 2010, drug traffickers discovered bitcoin, There were some overdose deaths on fentanyl and fentanyl-laced heroin bought through the internet with bitcoin. The operator of the first and most famous bitcoin-based drug market was caught by the FBI in 2013 and jailed for life. His stash of ~140'000 BTC was auctoned n 2014-2015 by the US government and most of the coins were bought by billionaire Tim Draper. + Also in 2010, speculators got the idea that, because of the nominally fixed issuance cap of 21 million BTC (the ticker symbol for bitcoin), its maket price would rise to a million dollars per unit or more. A bitcoin-money exchange called "MtGOX" was set up in Japan by a young French hacker and attracted tens of thousands of clients from all over the world. Frenetic 24/7 daytradng there and on dozen of other copycat exchanges pumped the price up, to a peak of 1200 USD/BTC in late 2013. + Still in 2020, some kid posted software to mine bitcoin on a GPU. Satoshi was quite upset and asked for a moratorium on such software, but was not heeded. A mining hardware race ensued, resulting first in dedicated FPGA mning boards, then in ever more energy-efficient ASIC chips. Another kid invented pooled mining as a way to even out the revenue stream. Mining quickly became centralized in a handful of big pools,most in China because of cheap electricity there. Today the bitcoin mining network is the largest supercomputer in the world, doing 10^(20) SHA-256 computations per second, and also the most expensive way of wasting electricity (the output of 7 standard nuclear reactors). + In 2010-12 Satoshi Nakamoto suddenly abandoned the project with no explanation, He has not been heard of ever since,and the coins that he is believed to have mined have not moved since then. His assistant Gavin Andresen took over as chief developer of the "reference" implementation. + It is believed that Satoshi gathered 1 million BTC in 2009, when he was basically the only steady miner, Today, they would be worth 10 billion USD or so. In 2011-10, someone realized that creating a cryptocurrency could be a profitable "private money" scam, and create another independent cryptocurrency called Litecoin. More than 5000 cryptocurrencies were created after that, most of them with no technical improvements, or broken from the start, or even with no actual blockchain or . Speculators loved all those new opportunities to gamble, and hundred are still being traded today. + Alarmed with the amount of money that their citizens were "investing" in those virtual donut holes, in 2013-12 the Chinese government cut bank access to all exchanges in the country (who by then were dominating the market) and prohibited the use of bitcoin in commerce. That intervention caused a sudden drop in the price, by more than 50%. + The ensuing "bank run" on MtGOX uncovered the fact that 600'000 of the 800'000 bitcoin that clients had deposited there had disappeared. What happened to them is still a mystery. Two days after this fact was revealed, a young American bitcoin entrepreneur in Singapore committed suicide (although her motive was not determined by the police). + The MtGOX incident started a tradition of cryptocurrency exchanges collapsing and eating all their clients' bitcoins, that continues to this day. But cryptocurrency speculators seem to enjoy the thrill, so they kept on trading all along. + in mid 2014, the Chinese government went a step further and closed all exchanges in the country to its citizens, letting them suck money from foreign idiots only. Russia too banned the use of crypto in commerce. A few other countries, including Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Ecuador, and Bolivia, eventually banned cryptocurrencies altogether; and it has been claimed that they are incompatible with Islamic principles. Many others restricted crypt activities, for instance by prohibiting banks from being involved; or have such projects working their way in the legislature, On the other hand, some governments like North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela have embraced cryptocurrencies as possible ways to evade US sanctions; Venezuela even issued a "cryptocurrency" called the Petro, allegedly backed by the country's oil reserves. The US and many other countries imposed KYC/AML requirements on exchanges operating in their territories, but such controls remain lax or non-existend in some large exchanges overseas. The town of Zug in Switzerland decided that it would become the "Cryptocurrency Valley" of the world, and dozens of cryptocurrency companies set foot there. + In 2014 a Neckbearded Prophet appeared on the scene with the claim that the capacity of the network should be kept limited to 4 transactions per second (tx/s) in order to drive the transaction fees through the roof. He claimed that such a fee increase was needed to compensate the revenue that miners would lose because ot the scheduled reward halvings. He failed to convince Gavin and other developers, but got the ears of some VC investors. They created a company called Blockstream (dubbed BlockTheStream by critics) with 30 million USD of capital, to put his plan in practice, and funded a few other "bitcoin startups" an "bitcoin news" websites to support it. Gavin was pushed out of the way and Blockstream became the de factor "owner" of the bitcoin network. + The price kept dropping through most of 2014-2015, down to 230 USD/BTC. But then it recovered and had another rally that peaked to 19'700 on 2018-12. Then it dropped again, and bumped around erratically, down to 3200 at one point. It is about 9500 now. + To this day, bitcoin use for legal payments has been practically zero. In order to facilitate such uses, several "bitcoin payment processing" companies were set up. They would take the user's bitcoins and immediately send the equivalent money (USD, EUR, JPY, etc) to a designated merchant, by bank wire. But they did not enjoy much success. In an attempt to promote bitcoin use, one company sponsored the 2014-12 St. Petersburg (FL) football bowl, and convinced dozens of shops in the town to accept bitcoin through its mediation. But the attempt was a big flop; the bitcoin-spending customers did not materialize, and the company had to terminate the 2-year sponsorship contract after the first year. + On the other hand, bitcoin continued to have modest success among criminals of all specialties, such as money launderers, corrupt politicians and cops, kidnappers, sex traffickers, pedophiles, pyramid scheme operators, etc. Hackers soon learned that bitcoins, rather than customer personal data or industrial secrets, was a much easier, more lucrative, and safer target for theft -- since they were scattered among hundreds of thousands of computers whose owners were generally inept at computer securuty. + "Ransomware" was a computer crime modality, that was almost unheard of before but flourished immensely thanks to bitcoin. Ransomware hackers would break into a computer,encrypt all files, and demanded payment in bitcoin to release the decription key. The use of bitcoin made it possible to automate the "service" so that the whole attack, including the collection of the ransom, could be carried out without any communication to or from the hacker. Victims of these attacks included several police forces and city governments inthe US, and UK's National Health System. + One of the many "altcoins" that were created in the wake of Litecoin was Ethereum. Its main innovation was that it allowed the uploading of arbitrary programs onto the blockchain, instead of just coin transfer transactions. The programs would be executed piecewise by the miners, and could control the transfer of the currency (ETH) in arbitrarilty comple ways, interatcting with other programs and transactions. It was claimed initially that these programs, being tamper-proof and unstoppable, would function as "smart contracts", rendering paper contracts and courts obsolete. But that did not happen, because those programs cannot use any information about the real world (such as the delivery of certain goods, or the existence of alleged property), and cannot have any effect on it (such as repossessing a car for lack of payment). On the other hand, Ethereum's "smart contracts" turned out to be ideal to obfuscate financial investment frauds, based on the scheme "give us your money, thank you and bye". One of the earliest, called TheDAO, collected millions of dollars (in ETH), even from the founders and big miners of the coin. Then a hacked found a bug in the smart contract's code, and exploited it to drain most of the funds to his own account. The develoeprs and miners agreed to change the protocol so as to allow the theft to be reversed. Rationally, that tampering with a "smart contract" should have killed the project; but most ETH hodlers did not care. Many other projects like TheDAO were stated, and many of them created new coins-within-the-coin ("ERC20 tokens") that were sold by creators to suckers in "Initial Coin Offerings" (ICOs). The SEC has prosecuted some of those that too obviously were fraudulent securities, but has let many others go on undisturbed. + In 2014, (in)famous game currency entrepreneur Brock Pierce pivoted into "Cryptocurrency Space",buying his way to the board of the (now defunct) Bitcoin Foundation. He started a project that would issue a "crytpcurrency" to be named "RealCoin", later renamed "Tether". The project was taken up by three other entrepreneurs (Giancarlo Devasini, Phil Potter, and Jan van der Velde) and the coin was launched in 2015. Its distinguishing feature was that that each coin (USDT) was claimed to be backed by 1 USD in the company's reserves, and hence would be always worth 1 USD. That claim was meaningless since the company makes it cleat that it is not obliged to reeem USDT for USD. Still, the coin has become accepted all over Crypto Space as being equivalent to USD -- especially for exchanges and traders who cannot use USD because of government restrictions. Since then the company has issued more than 8 billion USDT, without ever providing trustworthy audits or evidence that it has the corresponding backing USD. It is widelybeleived that the current BTC price is sustained almost entirely by those "fake" USD created by Tether from nothing. * In 2013, fringe financial operator Barry Silbert created a bitcoin-based investment fund (BIT), patterned after the GLD gold fund. A few other similar funds were created by other companies. They cannot be traded on public stock exchanges like NYSE and NASDAQ, but only through brokers and only by "accedited investors". Also a couple of bitcoin derivaties (futures contracts) were created, thanks to the traditionally lax crteria of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the apparent support of the CFTC's chairman Chris Giancarlo (who seems to have several relatives working for Accenture in cryptocurrency-related projects). On the other hands, the Securities Exchanges Commission (SEC) has consistently rejected proposals for Bitcoin-backed Electronic Traded Funds (ETFs) that would have been traded by the general public on open stock exchanges; including one by the Winklevoss twins (of Facebook fame), who allegedly bought a couple hundred thousand BTC back in 2012 or so. + A famous fan of bitcoin was a socialite called Jeff Epstein, who was known to operate a child sex trafficking network that catered to many wealthy clients in the US and abroad. Bill Clinton, British prince Andrew, and Trump's impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz were among his many alleged clients. Jeff was an important donor to the Media Lab, a famous research institute of MIT, which has been paying the salary of Gavin's successor and Blockstream supporter Wladimir van der Laan. Jeff had been blacklisted as a donor by the MIT trustees, but the Media Lab's director (who had been involved in Blocksteam's creation) hid Jeff's donations from them. Jeff was eventually arrested, but was suicided in his prison cell before he could be tried. After the donations to the Media Lab were uncovered, its director had to resign. Unfortunately, investigation on Jeff's activities, accomplices, and clients has apparently stopped. This inaction probably had nothing to do with the fact that, many years ago, the father of AG William Barr (who first recused himself from Jeff's case, but then un-recused) had hired Jeff as math teacher to an all-girls high school, even though Jeff had no qualifications to the job. + Blockstream's plans to intentionally drive the bitcoin network into congestion, by keeping the block size limit to 1 MB, was opposed by many bitcoin fans and gurus, as well as by most Chinese mining pools. After a three years of very bitter and dirty "Blocksize War", between the "Small-Blockians" and the "Big-Blockians", the latter forked the blockhain and the currency, on 2017-08-01. The Big-Blockian branch of the coin, called "Bitcoin Cash" (BCH) has not been popular with "investors", and currently trades at about 2-3% of the Small-Blockian branch ("Bitcoin Core", BTC). + In 2015-12, an Australian "entrepreneur" named Craig S Wright convinced reporters of *Wired* and *Gizmodo* that he was Satoshi Nakamoto -- just days before he fled the country and his home was raided by the Autralian police. Apparently he had made that claim to officers of the Australian Tax Office (ATO), who were investigating possible fraud in his collection of tens of millions of AUD subsidies from the government. After moving to London, Craig convinced an online casino baron and two of his associates that he was indeed Satoshi, and got funds from them to set up a company (nChain) that would file hundreds of patents on bitcoin and blockchain technology. While an initial supporter of Bitcoin Cash, Craig soon broke with the Big-Blockians and created another fork of bitcoin, which he called "Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision" (BSV). One of the original features of this coin is that it allows a full image to be permanently embedded in its blockchain, by a single transaction -- a feature that apparently has already been exploited by the CP Industry. However, Craig was never able to prove his claim to be Satoshi, even though he could easily have done so by signing a message with Satoshi's private key. And practically all of his titles and previous enterprises have been exposed as crude frauds. + For many years, cryptocurrency "developers" -- mostly self-taught programmers with no other real-world experience -- tried to convince banks and big companies that cryptocurrency networks could be used to solve many of their information processing and accounting problems, by providing protection against tampering and removing the need for mutual trust between cooperating entities. But since such prospective clients generally found cryptocurrencies less appealing than dog poo, some of those developers chose to sell instead pure "blockchain technology", without any associated cryptocurrency. That idea had even less technical merit than cryptocurrency-based applications; but "Blockchain" became a new buzzword that many companies adopted just to appear technologically savvy and forward-looking. Venerable IBM (whose stock has been dropping for years, and even before COVID-19 was 50%of its ATH) embraced it and provided a software framework called Hyperledger. Walmart anounced that it was developing a Blockchain-based system to prevent contaminated produce from being sold in their stores. The failing Long Island Iced Tea company merely changed its name to "Long Blockchain" and saw its stock price triple in one day. But none of hundreds of "Blockchain" projects succeded, and the fad is now fading... So, as you see, you did not miss anything of importance.