Choice Coin

18 years ago today, a stranger changed money forever. On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto sent a 9-page paper to a cryptography mailing list with an idea and a name nobody had heard before: "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." Two months later, Satoshi mined the very first block and hid a London Times headline inside of it about banks on the brink of a second bailout. Days later, the first transaction on Bitcoin took place, with 10 BTC moving from Satoshi to Hal Finney. By 2010, Bitcoin was real enough that Laszlo Hanyecz traded 10,000 of them for two pizzas. And then Satoshi started to fade. The forum posts stopped in December 2010, and in April 2011, one last email said "moved on to other things." Since then, $BTC has grown far beyond what anyone could have imagined, even without its creator. It survived four halvings, became legal tender in El Salvador, Wall Street got spot ETFs, the US government created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, and in October 2025, it touched an all-time high of $126,198. Happy 18th Birthday, Bitcoin! 🎂🧡