Bitcoin
In 2008, a paper on bitcoin, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was written by Satoshi Nakamoto. The first key idea introduced in the paper was that purely peer-to-peer electronic cash that does need an intermediary bank to transfer payments between peers.
Bitcoin is built on decades of cryptographic research such as the research in Merkle trees, hash functions, public key cryptography, and digital signatures. Moreover, ideas such as BitGold, b-money, hashcash, and cryptographic time stamping provided the foundations for bitcoin invention. All these technologies are cleverly combined in bitcoin to create the world's first decentralized currency. The key issue that has been addressed in bitcoin is an elegant solution to the Byzantine Generals problem along with a practical solution of the double-spend problem.
The value of bitcoin has increased significantly since 2011, as shown in the following graph:
Bitcoin price and volume since 2012 (on logarithmic scale)
The regulation...
