March 31 remains a very important day in the history of cryptocurrencies as a lot of important events took place on this day over the past ten years. Be it the milestone of reaching $1 billion market capitalization of Bitcoin or a major corporation like Microsoft adopts Ethereum in Windows, all took place on this day.
While we continue to provide coverage on the latest crypto news and analyze market developments to see what’s next in the industry, we should also cherish some of the major events that shaped the future of cryptocurrencies to get a grip on how that future might pan out in the coming years.
After the Bitcoin was started trading somewhere in 2011, the cryptocurrency community was already expecting Bitcoin to exceed the total market capitalization of $1 billion. The day came at the end of the first quarter of 2013 and yes, on March 31, the value of the sum of all Bitcoin in circulation went above $1 billion for the first time in history.
As of March 31, 2019, the market capitalization of Bitcoin is above $72 billion, and it paints a staggering picture of how the popularity of Bitcoin grew over the last six years.
The tax authority in the United States, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) termed Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as commodities, same as Gold or Silver, and clearly stated that it is not to be considered as a currency.
“General tax principles that apply to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual currency,” the IRS said in a statement that opened the door for capital gains taxes. Prior to the IRS statement, it was not clear how to tax the profits from buying and selling Bitcoin. However, with the IRS directive, it cleared the way to integrate cryptocurrencies into the legal financial system.
While it may not sound that important, but when the world got to know two agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the Secret Service were stealing Bitcoins during an undercover investigation of the Silk Road, the world paid attention.
Ordinary folks who never even heard of Bitcoin realized the vast potential of having an anonymous means of payment as otherwise Federal agents responsible for investigating the situation would not take the risk of stealing this precious commodity. It helped confirm the viability of Bitcoin to a wider audience.
In an unprecedented move, software giant Microsoft announced to partner with ConsenSys to enable its developers to build, test and deploy decentralized applications, or dapps, within the Microsoft Visual Studio Platform.
It was one of the first major collaboration between a leading industry giant and a crypto platform that gave Microsoft its place in the blockchain industry but provided ConsenSys and blockchain community with the credibility of partnering with a trusted publicly traded company.
Japan, being one of the largest economies in the world, said its Accounting Standards Board will create a framework to accept Bitcoin as a legal payment method in the country.
It was a big victory for the cryptocurrency community that marked the start of government recognition of the sector.
The popularity of Cryptocurrencies was growing fast in 2018, but Twitter, one of the most used social media platforms on the web announced to ban cryptocurrency ads on March 31, 2018.
The spam content and widespread fraud involving Bitcoin already forced Facebook and Google to ban ads related to cryptocurrencies and the decision from Twitter was already widely speculated.
