Tag: 2011 Series

On December 31, 2011, bitcoin ended the year at a value of $4.60. The much needed boost came after TV show, The Good Wife aired an episode called, “Bitcoin for Dummies” on December 19^th reviving awareness and interest in Bitcoin.

The episode focused on an attorney who was protecting the identity of his client, “the creator of bitcoin”, from the US Treasury’s demand for his identity and prosecution. The show inevitably sparked real world intrigue over bitcoin’s mysterious founder, and the prospect of bitcoin being a threat to the US Dollar, as it reached out of the tech sphere, and into the common household viewership of America.

Bitcoin = $4.60

This is a 1 /10 Limited Edition NFT. This artwork is limited to only 10 NFTs available for purchase.

Art details: Original digital hand painted motion art portrait (Not Computer Generated). The ticker tape displays the historical daily price indexes recorded on this day.

Dimensions: 720 x 1080, 19.2 MB, Duration: 15 seconds

Created with Corel Painter, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Premiere

Artist: Denise Holt

On November 23, 2011, WIRED published an article: “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin”, on the heels of a turbulent year of highs, lows, theft, corruption, scandals, and the rising cost of mining. The sub-headline says it all, “Wired follows the story of Bitcoin, the virtual currency you can actually spend—if it doesn’t get stolen first.”

The article also speculated on why bitcoin has struggled with so much volatility and corruption throughout the year, also touching on trying to figure out the identity of Satoshi Yakamoto, with the author questioning why he had “remained mysteriously silent” throughout all of the turmoil during the year, declaring, “If Nakamoto has forsaken his adherents, though, they are not prepared to let his creation die.”

The article ended with a statement by Jeff Garzik, early Bitcoin core developer:

“But Garzik, the developer, says that the most dedicated bitcoiners have stopped trying to hunt down Nakamoto. “We really don’t care,” he says. It’s not the individuals behind the code who matter, but the code itself. And while people have stolen and cheated and abandoned the bitcoiners, the code has remained true.”

Bitcoin = $2.32

This is a 1 /10 Limited Edition NFT. This artwork is limited to only 10 NFTs available for purchase.

Art details: Original digital hand painted motion art portrait (Not Computer Generated). The ticker tape displays the historical daily price indexes recorded on this day.

Dimensions: 720 x 1080, 19.2 MB, Duration: 15 seconds

Created with Corel Painter, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Premiere

Artist: Denise Holt

On October 18, 2011, Bitcoin value plummeted across exchanges – to a level where it costs more to “mine” them than they are worth.  BTC =$2.27

At this point in time, 7.48 million bitcoin had been mined of the 21 million bitcoin that will ever be released into circulation.

The mining problem was caused due to rising hashrates, ie, each computer hash being generated made it harder for the next one to generate (more and more complicated calculations for block confirmation). Miners at the time were stuck in a cycle of upgrading their systems to increase computing power, profiting for a few days, only to have the network catch up and detect the increase in power, and adjusting itself down, forcing miners to have to invest in more processing power.

That week in 2011, the network’s hashrate was around 8.596 TH/s or 8,596,000,000,000 hashes per second. While the hashrate was much less than today, it was still nine-hundred-six million percent (906,593,161.72%) higher in 2011 than on January 5, 2009.

This was seen by many as a cycle that was not sustainable. Many miners had to stop mining operations altogether because it became unaffordable and unprofitable.

This is a 1 /10 Limited Edition NFT. This artwork is limited to only 10 NFTs available for purchase.

Art details: Original digital hand painted motion art portrait (NOT Computer Generated). The ticker tape displays the historical daily price indexes recorded on this day.

Dimensions: 720 x 1080, 19.2 MB, Duration: 15 seconds

Created with Corel Painter, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Premiere

Artist: Denise Holt

On September 23, 2011, Bitcoin Update 0.4.0 introduces Wallet Encryption Passphrase on the heels of Mt Gox Wallet theft 3

Sometime in September, before this update, a hacker obtained the main wallet.dat file again and waited, then began withdrawing funds in October 2011. Mt Gox appears not to have noticed this, seen as an unconscionable neglect of fiduciary duty. – 603,000 bitcoins stolen.

This bitcoin update allowed wallet encryption & prompted users to, “enter a passphrase, which will be used as the key to encrypt your wallet and will be needed every time you wish to send Bitcoins. If you lose this passphrase, you will lose access to spend all of the bitcoins in your wallet, no one, not even the Bitcoin developers can recover your Bitcoins. This means you are responsible for your own security, store your passphrase in a secure location and do not forget it.” 

This is a 1 /10 Limited Edition NFT. This artwork is limited to only 10 NFTs available for purchase.

Art details: Original digital hand painted motion art portrait (NOT Computer Generated). The ticker tape displays the historical daily price indexes recorded on this day

Dimensions: 720 x 1080, 19.2 MB, Duration: 15 seconds

Created with Corel Painter, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Premiere

Artist: Denise Holt

On August 11, 2011, in a bid to restore confidence in the Bitcoin exchange market, Mt Gox took over the debts of Polish exchange, Bitomat (3^rd largest Bitcoin exchange at the time), after the company, in a technical error, inadvertently deleted its private keys for all of its bitcoin holders on July 26th, losing all of its wallet data, ie, all of its bitcoins.

Bitomat was a one-man operation that launched in April 2011. Its entire userbase was migrated to Mt. Gox. The cost of the take over = 17,000 bitcoins.

This is a 1 /10 Limited Edition NFT. This artwork is limited to only 10 NFTs available for purchase.

Art details: Original digital hand painted motion art portrait (NOT Computer Generated). The ticker tape displays the historical daily price indexes recorded on this day.

Dimensions: 720 x 1080, 20.1 MB, Duration: 15 seconds

Created with Corel Painter, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Premiere

Artist: Denise Holt

On July 18, 2011, after the last major hack caused the exchanged to be down for several weeks, Mt. Gox sought to prove it still had access to a significant quantity of bitcoin by conducting an on-chain transaction, an attempt to soothe its many users who were becoming anxious about the solvency of the platform. A few weeks after the hack, after many false starts, trading at Mt. Gox eventually resumed, and the bulk of the trades during the hack had been reversed. However, Mt. Gox has never been able to provide a rational explanation for what occurred. The lack of a consistent narrative from Mt. Gox caused many to believe that Mt. Gox had substandard oversight of its systems, interpreted as sheer negligence. Many concluded “never to trust Mt. Gox again”.

There was much uncertainty over the amount of bitcoin lost in the hack, and users were concerned about a possible run on Mt. Gox leading to the exchange going into liquidation and users losing funds.

Mt. Gox took a bold step in shuffling around 424,242.42424242 bitcoins to prove they still had control of them. At the time, this action seemed to settle the nerves of many of the traders.

This is a 1 /10 Limited Edition NFT. This artwork is limited to only 10 NFTs available for purchase.

Art details: Original digital hand painted motion art portrait (NOT Computer Generated). The ticker tape displays the historical daily price indexes recorded on this day.

Dimensions: 720 x 1080, 19.8 MB, Duration: 15 seconds

Created with Corel Painter, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Premiere

Artist: Denise Holt

On June 19, 2011, a Mt. Gox hack caused a temporary crash – plunging BTC to $0.01 before recovering to $15 moments later, with the price ending the day at $17.77. Mt. Gox was down for several weeks to resolve the matter and rolled back all transactions during the hack.

A hacker had gained access to Jed McCaleb’s administrative account, and sold bitcoins to crash the price, to withdraw as many bitcoins as possible within the US $1,000 per day limit. (Meaning the most that could have been stolen would be 100,000 bitcoins at $0.01) Other users who purchased bitcoin at low prices may have also withdrawn funds. In the end, 2,000-3000 bitcoins were lost/stolen. Due to conflicting accounts of events that occurred, and the actual negligence of Mt. Gox in not even realizing their own vulnerabilities, no one will ever really know what happened that day. In the end, more than the loss of bitcoins, was the revelation of security risk at Mt. Gox, due to such a public display of negligence, resulting in Investors becoming spooked by the ongoing security breaches, price volatility & criminal activity.

This is a 1 /5 Limited Edition NFT. This artwork is limited to only 5 NFTs available for purchase.

Art details: Original digital hand painted motion art portrait (NOT Computer Generated). The ticker tape displays the historical daily price indexes recorded on this day.

Dimensions: 720 x 1080, 19.9 MB, Duration: 15 seconds

Created with Corel Painter, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Premiere

Artist: Denise Holt

On June 9, 2011, Bitcoin spikes to $31 and settles the day at $29.60

after Gawker expose on Silk Road , published on  6/1, goes viral.

Art details: Original digital hand painted motion art portrait. The ticker tape displays the historical daily price indexes recorded on this day.

Dimensions: 720 x 1080, 19.4 MB, Duration: 15 seconds

Created with Corel Painter, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Premiere

Artist: Denise Holt

On May 22, 2011, somebody is believed to have accessed a wallet containing 300,000 bitcoin, which was kept unencrypted on a public drive. The thieves decided to return 297,000 bitcoin, keeping a 1% fee. The return transactions are believed to be for 280,000 and 17,000. – 3,000 bitcoins lost / stolen

BTC Price: $6.47

This is a 1 /10 Limited Edition NFT. This artwork is limited to only 10 NFTs available for purchase.

Art details: Original digital hand painted motion art portrait. The ticker tape displays the historical daily price indexes recorded on this day.

Dimensions: 720 x 1080, 19.4 MB, Duration: 15 seconds

Created with Corel Painter, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Premiere

Artist: Denise Holt

On March 6, 2011, Jed McCaleb sold the Mt. Gox Exchange to French developer Mark Karpelès, who was living in Japan, stating that “to really make Mt. Gox what it has the potential to be, would require more time than I have right now.”

The site was transferred to Mark Karpeles in exchange for six months worth of revenue. Karpeles became the largest shareholder and CEO.

BTC = $0.85

This is a 1 /10 Limited Edition NFT. This artwork is limited to only 10 NFTs available for purchase.

Art details: Original digital hand painted motion art portrait (NOT Computer Generated). The ticker tape displays the historical daily price indexes recorded on this day.

Dimensions: 720 x 1080, 19.8 MB, Duration: 15 seconds

Created with Corel Painter, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Premiere

Artist: Denise Holt