Bitcoin

The OG cryptocurrency

Bitcoin was announced in late 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto on the cryptography mailing list along with his now famous white paper. The network was launched in early 2009 by Satoshi, and was initially mined by very few folks, one of whom was Hal Finney.

Bitcoin, being the first functional decentralized cryptocurrency, sets the standard for many of the attributes commonly found to be desirable in other cryptocurrencies:

• It is resistant to change without wide consensus from the community of developers, miners, and users.
• It is essentially immutable - any transaction confirmed for six blocks can not be reversed.
• It is a store of value. With increased usage its value relative to the dollar has only increased over time.

Although many other have come along since it's launch, none have succeeded in gaining the widespread adoption that Bitcoin currently enjoys.