Unless you've been living under a rock for the past couple of months, you might have heard about Bitcoin. Its price action has been regularly mentioned by mainstream media, but the reality is, Bitcoin is considered to be a socio-political project that aims to save the human race from the tainted financial system, it even lead Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, to express her fear about its sudden rise to fame and demand it be regulated.
 
The Bitcoin network has been running, uninterrupted, for well over 11 years now. According to the latest estimates, there are over 100 million Bitcoin users around the world with top-tier institutions and companies like Square and Tesla joining the party and started adding Bitcoin to their treasuries.
 
The concept of an electronic cash system (e-cash) is not new. David Chaum, a famous computer scientist, created Ecash in 1990, but the project failed, so did other unmemorable examples. The reason behind these failed attempts was that no one figured out how can money be created by a decentralized, incorruptible network of participants.
 
Until October 2008, when a coder going by the alias Satoshi Nakamoto published his white paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic cash system" announcing that he has figured out a way for people to transact directly like cash without the involvement of a third party. He established an open-source online financial system that uses a digital token that could be stored like digital gold, or spent like digital cash. The creation and distribution of this token is governed by a pre-defined set of rules embedded in computer code. The distributed set of users participating in this financial network compete to secure the system by dedicating their computational power and energy and get Bitcoins as a reward.
 
Initially, a small group of coders, developers, and cryptographers grew around Bitcoin. This community worked on improving and maintaining the network, and in the meantime, mined* worthless Bitcoins. In May 2010, a software developer named Laszlo Hanyecz decided these tokens might be worth something as a means of payment for a real-world good and ordered two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins at an exchange rate of 0.1 cents per Bitcoin. Today, this order is worth more than $500 million.
 
No one knows if Satoshi is a man, woman, or a group of people, but the fact of the matter is, Bitcoin is here to stay. If this invention was a company, it would be valued at a staggering $1 Trillion and be ranked amongst the world's top 10 most valuable.
 
Bitcoin markets have popped up in virtually every country with local traders anxiously buying Bitcoins in exchange for their local currencies. Citizens of nations hit by hyperinflation, as is the case with Argentina and Venezuela, have flocked to use Bitcoin as a safe store of value. The U.S. sanctioned Iran and Cuba have also adopted the digital currency in an attempt to bypass the embargo.
 
For centuries, sovereigns, states, and governments retained their power through their sole right of issuing money. Bitcoin is a form of online money, network money, that humanity has never experienced before. It is controlled by no one but maintained by anyone. It is a borderless, decentralized, and open financial system. The big question is; what's stopping governments from shutting it down?
 
Stay tuned next month for the next episode of Satoshi's Diaries.