Here's a decade in Bitcoin.
The most important decade of the 21st century? 🤔
Let's see 👇
The Bitcoin community self-organizes, and begins to grow into new type of global institution.
The Mt. Gox fiasco highlights infrastructural deficiencies; the lack of secure custody standards and the systemic risks imposed by exchanges.
BIP32 introduces HD keys & sets a new standard for Bitcoin custody and user onboarding via safer wallets.
➡️➡️For the first time in human history, you can store your wealth in your brain by memorizing 12 words. No centralized intermediaries needed. ⬅️⬅️
Mining industrializes and hashrate surpasses 100 PH/s for the first time.
Meanwhile, pundits claim Bitcoin is dead and that the future is "blockchain, the miraculous database"
We faced the question: Who controls Bitcoin?
Miners? ❌ Developers? ❌ Personalities? ❌
Users ✅
As the risks of on-chain scaling become clear, promising alternatives like Lightning show that a layered, backwards-compatible approach to technological innovation is possible.
BIP114 introduces MAST and minds are blown. 🤯
Infrastructure is being pushed on all fronts; custody, markets, wallets, education.
Bitcoin becomes a liquid asset on a global scale. 🌎
There's an attempt to highjack Bitcoin with plenty of enterprise support: the ultimate stress test of Bitcoin governance
USAF reinforces that users are the ones in charge
The ecosystem outside of Bitcoin faces a series of hard realizations:
Scaling is hard, on-chain governance is flawed, deployment takes time, and you might have broken the law.
Institutions converge on BTC.
Bitcoin started this decade on the fringes.
We now have a bitcoiner in a US state senate.
Its power structures were tested over and over again. Yet, here we are.
Who would've thought a leaderless system that converts electricity into money would've lasted this long?
I think Hal would've been proud. You too should start: