What has been the price trend of bitcoin from 2009 until 2018?
First of all, it is worth noting that the first BTC was created on January 3rd, 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. At the time, only two people were using bitcoin, and throughout the year BTC had very limited use.
In fact, to be honest, there is now no trace of any possible trade in BTC with US dollars, or other fiat currencies, dating back to 2009, so in fact there are no reference prices for that year.
The price of bitcoin is in fact nothing more than the rate at which the last trade in dollars, or other fiat currencies, for all intents and purposes took place, thus since there is no record of any such trade in 2009 there are no reference prices.
However, there is at least one statement from a person, Kristoffer Koch, who claims to have bought 5,000 BTC in 2009 for about $26.6. So for that year, this price of $0.00532 per 1 BTC can be taken as a reference, which is also in line with the extraction costs of that time.
The first documented trades date from around mid-2010 and took place at an exchange rate of between $0.05 and $0.07, i.e. ten times Koch’s purchase price.
Over the course of the year, the price increased further, reaching $0.39, and closing at $0.3.
The first year for which there is complete information is 2011, the third year of Bitcoin’s existence.
It opened at $0.30, but over the course of the year, it rose very rapidly, due to what is probably the first real speculative bubble in the price of bitcoin. In the first half of June, it reached $32, more than a hundred times its value at the beginning of the year. That bubble burst and the year ended at $4.72, still more than ten times the initial price.
Halvings and bubbles: the price of Bitcoin from 2012 to 2018
The following year, 2012, was the year of the first halving, but this occurred in November. The previous all-time high of $32 was never exceeded, but there was a slow rise from $4.72 to $13.5.
In 2013 there was the first big speculative bubble, with a bull-run that lasted a year, culminating in two months of excessive euphoria that took the price up to $1,156, before closing the year at $757. In other words, the price multiplied again by almost a hundred times over the course of the year, before falling back a little in December.
In 2014, the price dropped to $289, and then closed at $319. Despite the drop, however, the final price was still 24 times higher than the starting price of the previous year.
The second cycle, which began with the halving of 2012, ended with a further loss in 2015, when the price fell to $172, before recovering to close the year at $431.
It is worth noting that the post-bubble low of the second cycle, $172, was still 36 times higher than the post-bubble low of 2011.
In 2016, the year of the second halving, the price started to rise again. It peaked at $979, close enough to the all-time high of 2013, and then closed at $964.
The year 2017, like 2013, was characterized by a long bull run, which ended with a large speculative bubble that lasted about two months. 2017 was also the year after the halving.
The price actually first dropped further to $756, but then soared to around $20,000, before closing at $14,156. This closing price was more than ten times higher than the previous all-time high in 2013.
2018, like 2014, was a year of decline, with the price first falling to around $6,000, and then even to $3,191, before closing at $3,743, which was still a price almost four times higher than the previous year’s opening price.
Towards the third halving and beyond
Thereafter, 2019 was a relatively neutral year, unlike 2015, while in 2020, the year of the third halving, the price rose sharply, reaching new all-time highs at the end of the year (later surpassed by a large margin in 2021).
