When did cryptocurrency start?

Cryptographic electronic money was first conceived in 1983 by David Chaum, an American cryptographer. This design never caught on due to some important technical limitations. There have also been a few other attempts to create a widely adopted electronic money after that but they also didn’t catch on.  It was not until 2009 that the first truly decentralized and successful cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was created by Satoshi Nakamoto. One of the defining pieces of the bitcoin software that made it different from all previous versions of electronic currency is that it solved the “double spend” problem so that the same coin could not be spent twice.  Bitcoin spawned 1000s of other cryptocurrencies.