The Next Decade P1: The Road Behind

Ten Years Behind, Ten Years Ahead

Most of a journey takes place without the beginning or end in sight.

It’s a new year, and with that new year come all the normal social media circle jerking centered around predictions of “what will happen in 2020!” I wanted to extend that out a bit, and look at the next decade. But first, I wanted to spend a minute going over the last (yeah, I know I’m a year late, blah blah) to really drill in how far things have come.

Mining and Network Security

In 2010 the network was secured by hobbyists desktop CPUs, trivially over powered by any large resourceful actor. At the start of 2020 it is secured by billions of dollars of hardware consuming the collective electricity requirements of entire small nations, supplied to the operators by many different companies valued at billions of dollars (given, pie in the sky valuations, but still). In 10 years, the security mechanism of the network shifted from consumer hardware and hobbyists to specialized ASIC equipment and professionally managed data center operations.

Protocol Development

In 2010 you could send Bitcoin to public keys (or IP addresses), timelock transactions(JUST the transaction, not the UTXO), do raw multisig which were massive and expensive even to send to, and oh yeah: anyone could spend any coins using OP_RETURN due to a bug. And yes, I know the script system had much more back then, I’m talking about what was practically doable for an average person. In 2020…well I think I have to bullet point this:

• Use P2SH to make sending money to more advanced scripts (like multisig) cheaper for the sending party.
• Timelock an actual UTXO to an absolute blockheight or UNIX timestamp.
• Timelock an actual UTXO to a relative blockheight or UNIX timestamp interval from it’s creation.
• Construct transactions that do not have malleable TXIDs for second layer protocols/chained transactions thanks to Segregated Witness. (Also, we can now upgrade script easier due to SegWit having its own versioning. There are only so many undefined OPs in Bitcoin script that can be defined to add new script functions to Bitcoin script. SegWit versioning allows adding new functions by using new Witness versions instead of using up very scarce undefined OPs.)
• Utilize a basic in-development version of the Lightning Protocol, a second layer enabled by the malleable fix implemented in SegWit.
• Have actually deployed sidechains in which more advanced and/or experimental features can be deployed and tested easier.

Ten years has produced an impressive amount of primitives with which to build upon the core foundation of Bitcoin’s base network and blockchain. Especially considering the complexity and difficulty of trying to ascertain consensus on upgrades, and then implementing and deploying such upgrades if it is present.

Political Relevance

In 2010, Bitcoin was just an insignificant blip on the radar. The CIA had only just noticed and taken interest in it. Their response was to have a developer come in and give a talk, resulting in the disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto. Other than that, people weren’t paying attention, politicians weren’t paying attention, most agencies weren’t paying attention (except Alphabet ones we might not know about now). Bitcoin was an obscure nothing.

In 2020…Bitcoin has spawned an entire market and industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Exchanges have made billions in revenue from trading fees. Miners have made billions of dollars collectively in return for their operational investments. Tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions, of people own Bitcoin (metrics here are very vague and hard to really distill meaningful information from). We’ve gone from the CIA barely taking interest, to essentially every meaningful government in the world regularly having legislature or committee meetings to discuss Bitcoin and everything it has spawned in terms of its macro-economic and geopolitical consequences, and how to respond to them. Nations have launched cryptocurrencies. Nations have sanctioned cryptocurrency addresses. They are officially at the table. Back in 2010 only one agency that is notorious for having their nose everywhere was paying attention (that we know), now the entire world is paying attention.

Things have changed. As the metaphor goes, good luck stopping the train.

(This is just Part 1 of 4, read the next part here.)