Bitcoin History Part 6: The First Bitcoin Exchange
Aside from mining, the only way to obtain bitcoin in the very early days was by trading it on forums or IRC. This arrangement relied on the other party fulfilling their side of the deal, since there were few escrow services back then. Bitcoin didn't have to wait long for a dedicated exchange to spring up, thankfully, with the first cryptocurrency exchange going live in March 2010.
Bitcoin Gets Its First Market
The first cryptocurrency exchange wasn't Bitstamp, Vircurex, or Btc-e. It was in fact a now defunct platform called Bitcoinmarket.com. The site was proposed on the Bitcoin talk forum (where else?) by "dwdollar"on Jan. 15, 2010. "Hi everyone. I'm in the process of building an exchange, "he wrote." I have big plans for it, but I still have a lot of work to do. It will be a real market where people will be able to buy and sell Bitcoins with each other." He elaborated:
I am trying to create a market where Bitcoins are treated as a commodity. People will be able to trade Bitcoins for dollars and speculate on the value. In theory, this will establish a real-time exchange rate so we will all have a clue what the current value of a Bitcoin is, compared to a dollar.
Dwdollar's quest was a much-needed one, for at the time there was little common consensus on how much a bitcoin was worth. Most price charts only go back as far as summer 2010, at which point 1 BTC was trading for around $0.05, though when Bitcoinmarket.com launched in March of that year, a single bitcoin was priced at around $0.003 – that's 333 BTC to the dollar.
By this point, Bitcoinmarket.com's days were numbered. There was a new exchange poised to open its virtual doors to a tsunami of bitcoiners, many of whom had been wooed after learning of a deep web marketplace known as Silk Road which launched in February of that year. Bitcoinmarket.com's successor launched in July 2011 and by 2014 was handling 70% of all global bitcoin trades. Its name, of course, was Mt. Gox.
Source from Bitcoin.com, author Kai Sedgwick
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