What has Bitcoin done to the world in the past ten years?
Nov 23, 2024
At this important node destined to go down in the history of the encryption industry, we may wish to review the history. What changes have Bitcoin brought to the world since its birth? Where will the future go?
In October 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released a white paper on Bitcoin. Three months later, on a small server in Helsinki, Satoshi Nakamoto dug up the first block in the Bitcoin chain, along with the first batch of 50 bitcoins.
At that time, when the global economic crisis spread, Bitcoin was born in "troubled times". In fact, in the first block of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto also left such an intriguing sentence:
"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout for Banks (on January 3, 2009, the Finance Minister was on the verge of implementing the second round of bank emergency assistance)."
This sentence not only provides evidence for the birth time of Bitcoin, but also seems to capture a trace of ridicule and contempt for the old financial world.
Therefore, Bitcoin, which was born in this context, naturally has a gene of change and rebellion. Bitcoin carrying this gene will inevitably be countered by the traditional world. Until today, the voice of questioning Bitcoin is still one after another, but some changes are taking place quietly.
Changes in regulatory attitudes of major countries
In the early four or five years, due to the little influence of Bitcoin, except for the report of Virtual Currency System released by the European Central Bank in October 2012, which positioned Bitcoin as the "third kind of virtual currency", other major countries in the world basically adopted a laissez-faire attitude towards it.
Until 2013, Bitcoin ushered in the first bull market in history, and its price exceeded the $1,000 mark for the first time, which made people begin to face up to this new thing. In the United States, according to the policy guidelines formulated by the US Treasury Department in March 2013, two guiding principles for the supervision of virtual currency were determined: first, promoting innovation; The second is to ensure transparency. At the federal level, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau of the United States are also studying how to deal with the challenges brought by virtual currency.
In China, on December 5, 2013, five ministries and commissions, including the People's Bank of China, China Banking Regulatory Commission, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China Securities Regulatory Commission and China Insurance Regulatory Commission, issued the Notice on Preventing Bitcoin Risks, which defined Bitcoin as a virtual commodity and made it clear that Bitcoin does not have the same legal status as currency and cannot and should not be used as currency in the market.
As of November 2015, the following table shows the supervision and attitudes of major countries in the world towards Bitcoin. Based on the standard of legality, it is briefly divided into three categories: legal, neutral, prohibited or restricted. We can browse the information in the table first, and we will continue to track the changes of attitudes of some countries with this standard.
After the price of Bitcoin exceeded $1,000 in 2013, it quickly entered the bear market cycle. However, the exploration of bitcoin regulatory legislation has quietly accelerated in the bear market. After entering 2015, more and more European and American traditional financial institutions and government departments began to explore and test the application value of Bitcoin in depth, which released a positive signal for the development of the encryption industry.
In 2015, with the initial completion of the legislative process of Bitcoin supervision in the United States, represented by New York State, the relevant legislation in California was gradually launched, and the California legislature formulated the state's money transfer law to clearly regulate the operation of virtual currency. The Act stipulates that cryptoasset companies must have a license from the Department of Business Supervision (DBO) or have obtained a tax-free license from the agency before they can operate. Since then, California and new york have become the two poles of the US financial supervision policy on Bitcoin.
In Europe, the regulatory policies of many countries are also changing. By 2017, Spain, Finland, Belgium, Poland and many other countries have announced that Bitcoin is allowed to exist or classified as a financial instrument, and it is taxed or exempted from value-added tax according to law. Most of these countries were neutral two years ago.
In Asia, after Japan, South Korea also announced in January 2018 that it would levy taxes on digital currency trading platform according to the existing tax policy, with the tax rate of 22% corporate income tax and 2.2% local income tax. In March, 2021, South Korea further began to implement the "real-name registration system for Encrypted Assets Trading" to strengthen the supervision of the encryption industry and promote its orderly development.
In March 2018, the Thai Cabinet also passed two major draft royal decrees, which aim at regulating the transactions of encrypted assets and taxing the capital gains of investors in encrypted assets.
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