On October 31, it was 18 years since Satoshi Nakamoto published Bitcoin's whitepaper, in the middle of the financial crisis. The document has since turned the world's financial system upside down: bitcoin is today worth around $1.55 trillion.
«Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System» described a way to send money directly between two parties without a bank or other intermediary approving or recording the payment. The document, written under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, was posted to a cryptography mailing list on October 31, 2008, four weeks after the US Congress passed a $700 billion bank bailout package. The first bitcoin block was mined on January 3, 2009, with a headline from The Times coded into it: «Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks». 18 years later, bitcoin is both a financial asset managed through exchange-traded funds and an asset some companies and states hold as a reserve.
The road there ran through a series of crises the industry created itself. The world's then-largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, collapsed in 2014 after losing around 850,000 bitcoin to theft, leaving a lasting mark on trust in exchanges that hold customers' funds. The price nonetheless climbed to near $20,000 in December 2017, fell sharply back, and was hit again when the crypto exchange FTX collapsed in November 2022, leaving customers with enormous losses. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan, who called bitcoin a fraud in 2017, has since reversed course and now lets his own customers buy the currency. Larry Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, made an equally sharp reversal: in 2017 he called bitcoin a tool for money laundering, before launching the exchange-traded fund IBIT himself in January 2024 – today the group's most profitable fund in fees.
The launch of US spot bitcoin ETFs in January 2024 opened a new entry point for traditional investors, who have since been able to gain exposure to bitcoin through ordinary brokerage accounts without having to manage private keys themselves. By the end of October 2026, US spot bitcoin ETFs together managed around 1.28 million bitcoin, equivalent to 6.36 percent of the circulating supply, with total assets under management of $102.97 billion. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) is the largest in the group, with around $66.3 billion in assets under management.
Where the ETFs offer passive exposure through a fund, a very different group of players has chosen to hold bitcoin directly on their own balance sheet. The software company Strategy is the largest of them, with 848,517 BTC as of October 31, more than 4 percent of bitcoin's maximum supply, built up through repeated purchases financed by capital raises.
A third model is state ownership. In March 2025, a US presidential order mandated the creation of a strategic bitcoin reserve for the US government, initially funded with bitcoin seized through criminal cases.
Bitcoin's price has moved from fractions of a cent in 2009, through $1,000 in 2013 and near $20,000 in December 2017, to a peak of $126,223 in October 2025. After a fall to around $58,600 in June 2026, bitcoin now trades around $78,000, with a total market value of around $1.55 trillion.
Interest has since spread to the rest of Wall Street. In April 2026, Morgan Stanley launched its own bitcoin fund with the lowest management fee on the market, Charles Schwab opened direct crypto trading for its 39 million customers, and Goldman Sachs filed for its first crypto product. At the same time, tokenized securities – digital versions of stocks and bonds that can be traded on blockchains – have grown by more than 260 percent over the past year, according to data firm RWA.xyz.
When programmer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoin for two pizzas in May 2010, it was the first known trade in the new currency – and exactly what the whitepaper described: electronic money used to pay for something concrete. At the peak price in October 2025, those same bitcoin would have been worth around $1.26 billion. 18 years after the whitepaper, bitcoin in practice is used far more often as a store of value than as a means of payment.
Jack Dorsey's payments company Block is betting that could change. Through the Cash App, US users can now have their paycheck deposited in bitcoin, round up card purchases into bitcoin savings, and find merchants that accept the currency, under the slogan «built for a bitcoin everyday». The effort is still small compared with bitcoin's role as an investment, and whether its volatile price and usability ever make it a real alternative to cards and banks remains an open question 18 years after the whitepaper.
Sources: TradingView (Coinpedia), Cointelegraph, Bitcoin.com News, BeInCrypto, Kaupr
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