The Golden Age of Bitcoin was during the final months of 2010 starting with the famous Laszlos Pizza, until ~mid 2011 with the peak of the first bubble going from ~$0.10 to 30usd. During which Satoshi disappeared. The end of the Golden area really started when the "Generate Bitcoin" option was removed from the WXwidgets client, the end of Bruce Wagner's "Bitcoin Show", and finally: the Bitcoinica hacks! The final sundown happened around 2014 with the emergence of Ethereum and the tsunami of shitcoins, many of wich are still around (dogecoin, etc) The bitcoin software itself started to become crap in two phases: