It's a day of celebration for longtime bitcoin investors, who have held on for dear life, or "HODL'd" through several of the cryptocurrency's boom-and-bust cycles, during which government and financial institutions remained dismissive — and even hostile — toward the asset class.
That's largely because of the cryptocurrency's anti-establishment roots. The original idea for bitcoin was proposed at the height of the 2008 financial crisis: a "peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution," its founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, wrote in the Bitcoin Whitepaper.