The Original Community: Code, Principles, and Decentralization

Bitcoin's first users were not investors or financial analysts. They came from technical and ideological backgrounds:

• Cryptographers and information security specialists

• Open-source software programmers

• Cyberactivists

• Cypherpunks with a digital sovereignty agenda

For this community, decentralization was not a technical feature, but a political stance. They used Bitcoin as a tool for economic autonomy and institutional resistance. Transactions were commented on in forums, discussed from the code, and evaluated for their cryptographic elegance, not for profitability.

The first nodes ran on personal computers. There were no institutional wallets or regulated exchanges. Bitcoin was, above all, an executable idea.