It is a new year, and with that new year all the jet of Circle of normal social networks focused on the predictions of “What will happen in 2020!” I wanted to extend that a little and look at the next decade. But first, I wanted to spend a minute reviewing the last one (yes, I know that I arrive a year late, blah, bla) to really drill how far things have come.
Mining and Network Security
In 2010, the Network was secured by the fans of desktop desktop, trivially exaggerated by any great ingenious actor. At the beginning of 2020, it is secured by billions of dollars of hardware that consume the collective electricity requirements of entire nations, supplied to the operators by many different companies valued in billions of dollars (given, cake assessments in the sky, but still). In 10 years, the network security mechanism changed consumer hardware and specialized equipment and professionals of professionally administered data centers.
Protocol development
In 2010, you can send bitcoin to public keys (or IP addresses), Timelock transactions (only the transaction, not the utxo), make multisig to a large extent that they were huge and expensive even to send, and oh yes: anyone could spend coins using op_return due to an error. And yes, I know that the script system had much more at the time, I am talking about what was practically feasible for an average person. In 2020 … well, I think I have to aim this:
- Use P2SH to make money to more advanced scripts (such as Multisig) cheaper for the shipping party.
- The real blockhealight or unix Timestmp.
- Real utxo time time at a relative interval of Bloquheight or Unix Timestamp of its creation.
- Build transactions that do not have malleable txid for second -layer protocols/chained transactions thanks to segregated witnesses. (In addition, we can now update the easiest script because Segwit has its own version. There are only so many indefinite operations in the Bitcoin script that can be defined to add new script functions to Bitcoin script. Segwit versioning allows you to add new functions through the use of new witnesses.
- Use a basic developing version of the Lightning protocol, a second layer enabled by the malleable solution implemented in Segwit.
- In reality, they have implemented lateral technologies in which the most advanced and/or experimental characteristics can be implemented and tested more easily.
Ten years has produced an impressive amount of primitive to build on the central base of the Bitcoin base and blockchain network. Especially taking into account the complexity and difficulty of trying to determine the consensus on the updates, and then implement and implement such updates if present.
Political relevance
In 2010, Bitcoin was just an insignificant error in the radar. The CIA had Alone noticed and interested in him. His answer was that a developer entered and gave a talk, which resulted in the disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto. Apart from that, people did not pay attention, politicians were not paying attention, most agencies did not pay attention (except the alphabet that we could not know now). Bitcoin was not a dark nothing.
In 2020 … Bitcoin has generated a whole market and an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The exchanges have obtained billions in income from commercial rates. Miners have earned billions of dollars collectively in exchange for their operational investments. Dozens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions, of people have bitcoin (the metrics here are very vague and difficult to distill significant information). We have gone from the CIA as soon as we are interested, to all the significant governments of the world, regularly having meetings of the legislature or committee to discuss Bitcoin and everything that has generated in terms of its macroeconomic and geopolitical consequences, and how to respond to them. The nations have launched cryptocurrencies. The nations have sanctioned cryptocurrency addresses. They are officially at the table. In 2010, only an agency that is known for having the nose everywhere was paying attention (which we know), now everyone is paying attention.
Things have changed. As the metaphor says, good luck stopping the train.
(This is only part 1 of 4, read the next part tomorrow).
This is a guest publication of Shinobi. The opinions expressed are completely yours and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC INC or Bitcoin magazine.
