Gox (“Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange”) wasn’t originally founded for bitcoin, but it launched a bitcoin exchange early in 2010. There’s also the finite nature of bitcoin: under the current protocol, there can only be 21 million bitcoin in the world. Bitcoin communities sprang up on platforms like IRC and Reddit.The most significant community for early bitcoin, though, was dark web marketplace Silk Road. Gox and the other exchanges function essentially as the bitcoin version of commodity exchanges, simplifying the experience of trading bitcoin. On January 12th, Nakamoto sent 10 bitcoin to Hal Finney, and a new finance counterculture was born. The trade was dominated by marijuana, fake IDs, benzos and other prescription drugs that were all facilitated by bitcoin. At the end of 2014, Microsoft began accepting bitcoin payments, according to Cointelegraph.
