Bitcoin's White Paper Turns 11 as Network Passes Milestones

"I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party," Satoshi wrote to open his email, attaching the bitcoin white paper.

Rolling out bitcoin's code the following January with the mining of the genesis block, bitcoin's first year was inauspicious at best.

Looking at the numbers, the last 10 months have given bitcoin hodlers much to be thankful for; October, even more so.

As ARK Invest analyst Yassine Elmandjra wrote on Twitter, the price movement has only happened three times in bitcoin's history.

The previous two times Bitcoin saw a >40% daily gain, it was trading at $0.40 and $5.65.

Today, Bitcoin's 42% swing is the 3rd largest daily gain in price history.

Bitcoin's hash rate - a good metric for the amount of energy put towards mining bitcoin's and securing the network - hit an all-time high at over 110 exahashes per second on Oct. 23.

As recent initial public offering filings for mining giants Canaan and Bitmain show, bitcoin mining has gone a long way since the early days of CPU farming, and is now big business.

Bitcoin also just mined its 18 million coin, leaving a mad scramble for the last 3 million.

Bitcoin fees collected reached $1 billion in total earlier this week too, right in time for today's celebrations.