Bitcoin Timeline

I first published this on Blockgyan.com

1. August 2008: Satoshi registers the domain bitcoin.org and soon starts sending private emails to a few people who he thought might be interested in the proposal. 
2. October 2008: Satoshi publicly releases a white paper that described the protocol, and then soon after, he releases the initial code for Bitcoin as well. 
3. January 2009: Satoshi mines the first block called 'Genesis block'. 
4. January 10, 2009: Hal Finney, the computer scientist and one of the first teammates of Satoshi tweets about Bitcoin for the first time. [See above image]
5. January 11, 2009: First ever Bitcoin transaction takes place as Satoshi sends Bitcoins to Hal Finney at a block height of 170.
6. October 2009: New Liberty Standard opens a service to buy and sell bitcoin, with an initial exchange rate of 1,309.03 BTC to one U.S. Dollar. The rate is derived from the cost of electricity used by a computer to generate, or “mine” the currency.
7. May 22, 2010: Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer paid a fellow Bitcoin Talk forum user 10,000 BTC for two Papa John’s pizzas. This is the first ever Bitcoin transaction used to buy any products/services. The day is celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
8. July 2010: Bitcoin sees a ten-fold increase in value from US$0.008/BTC to US$0.080/BTC in five days starting July 12.
9. July 2010: MtGox Bitcoin currency exchange market is established by Jed McCaleb.
10. September 2010: The first “pooled” mining operation mines its first Bitcoin block.
11. November 2010: Bitcoin reaches $1 million market cap.
12. February 9, 2011: Bitcoin price touches $1. 
13. August 2010: An exploit in Bitcoin source code leads to a generation of 184 billion bitcoins. A new version of the client was published within five hours of the discovery that contained a soft forking change to the consensus rules that rejected output value overflow transactions (as well as any transaction that paid more than 21 million bitcoins in an output for any reason).
14. December 2010: Satoshi Nakamoto goes off the radar.
15. July 2011: First recorded theft of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Forum member, allinvain, claims that 25,000 BTC were stolen from his wallet. At the time, the exchange rate put the amount close to $ 375,000.
16. November 2011: Bitcoin market cap exceeds $1 billion for the first time as per the price calculated by multiplying the number of Bitcoins in circulation by the last trade on MtGox.
17. December 19, 2011: The Good Wife, an American legal and political drama television series airs "Bitcoin for Dummies" TV episode.
18. March 1, 2012: Bitcoins worth $228,000 stolen from customers of hacked Webhost Linode. 
19. November 15, 2012: Popular content management platform Wordpress starts accepting Bitcoin. 
20. November 28, 2012: The first halving event -- Block reward halves for the first time from 50 BTC per block to 25 BTC per block.
21. March 25, 2013: Bitcoin value surges in the backdrop of Cyprus Bail-In plan. By April the price of one bitcoin rose from about $80 to over $260. 
22. October 2013: FBI seizes Silk Road an online black market and reportedly seizes144,000 bitcoins, worth $28.5 million then.
23. October 2013: The first big Bitcoin acquisition takes place. Gambling site SatoshiDice sells for 126,315 BTC.
24. November 2013: Virgin Galactic announces they will accept Bitcoin for space travel trips.
25. November 18, 2013: US Senate holds a hearing on Bitcoin.
26. November 20, 2013: Bitcoin trading gets a cautious nod from China’s Central Bank.
27. November 2013: Bitcoin soars past for the $1,000 mark for the first time.
28. February 2014: Mt. Gox, the largest bitcoin exchange at the time declared bankrupt after the theft or disappearance of 850,000 bitcoins valued at $450 million in February 2014, along with $27 million in cash.
29. August 28, 2014: Hal Finney, one the first bitcoin developer dies in Phoenix, Arizona.
30. December 2014: Microsoft begins accepting Bitcoin.
31. June 23, 2015: New York state releases regulations to control Virtual Currencies.
32. November 2015: Satoshi Nakamoto nominated for the 2016 Nobel Prize in Economics.
33. December 2015: Pieter Wuille proposes SegWit concept to scale Bitcoin network.
34. February 21, 2016: Influential members of the Bitcoin community met in Hong Kong to discuss a development plan and timeline for scaling Bitcoin. The closed-door meeting included over 30 miners, service providers, and Bitcoin Core developers and was meant to address solutions to the block size debate.
35. April 27, 2016: Popular gaming platform Steam starts accepting Bitcoin. 
36. July 9, 2016: Second halving event: The block reward decreases for the second time in Bitcoin's history, resulting in a new reward of 12.5 bitcoins per mined block down from 25 Bitcoins per mined block. 
37. August 2, 2016: Bitfinex, the largest Bitcoin exchange by volume gets hacked.  119,756 bitcoins equivalent to $72 million USD stolen.
38. January 3, 2017: Bitcoin price breaches $1000 after three years. 
39. March 10, 2017: SEC denies permission to Winkelvos brothers exchange-traded fund (ETF). 
40. April 1, 2017: Japanese legislature passes a law to make Bitcoin as a legal tender. 
41. May 23, 2017: Bitcoin scaling agreement signed at Consensus 2017. The agreement intended to scale Bitcoin network by increasing the block capacity through activating Segregated Witness and then doubling the block size.
42. June 2017: Bitcoin market cap breaches $100 billion mark.
43. August 1, 2017: Bitcoin hard forks into Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) over disagreements on the implementation of Bitcoin scaling agreement.
44. September 2017: China bans Bitcoin and ICOs. Cryptocurrency markets tumble 28% that week.
45. October 24, 2017: Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is forked from Bitcoin at block height at block height 491,407.
46. November 2017: Bitcoin price touches $10,000 for the first time.
47. November 2017: TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory dedicates an episode to Bitcoin.
48. December 2017: Bitcoin price soars to $20,000 for the first time.
49. December 2017: CME and Cboe announce the launch of Bitcoin Futures.
50. January 2018: Bitcoin falls back to $10,000 price level.