Bitcoin just turned ten years old, but is still not all grown up

By Felicity Duncan

Wednesday marked Bitcoin's tenth birthday – on 31 October, 2008, a person or persons using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto released a white paper describing a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system," which would over time grow into the Bitcoin network.

By some measures, Bitcoin has been successful. It opened the way for cryptocurrencies, attracted massive investment interest, and achieved stratospheric valuations for a short time. But measured against the goal outlined in the Nakamoto paper – being an accessible, useful, efficient payments system – it has failed. Despite all the hype, only a tiny, tiny fraction of global payments are made in Bitcoin (most of them to the creators of ransomware).

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