On 2023-January-3, Bitcoin turned old enough to go dating. Let's make sure Bitcoin reaches adulthood and maturity.
Cover image made using MS Paint.
Bitcoin logo comes from Cryptologos.cc.
Screen capture of drawing of shotgun comes from a GIF image at Giphy.com (via Ecency).
Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin on 2009-January-3, and the world hasn't been the same since. For a while no one was sure what we were getting with Bitcoin. We knew what it was supposed to be and what it was supposed to do. What Bitcoin is today isn't what many people had expected, perhaps not even the aforementioned Satoshi Nakamoto.
Infancy
In the earliest days, Bitcoin was a proof of concept: decentralized, trustless, and permissionless digital money as a substitute to the fiat currencies issued by central banks worldwide.
Enough people knew about Bitcoin to keep it alive, to keep it going. The miners definitely saw the potential of Bitcoin, and the network grew. Users of Bitcoin were still few. After all, who was accepting BTC locally? What could people buy with it.
So in its infancy Bitcoin was under protective custody if not life support.
Toddler
Bitcoin picked up enough users to move a couple of decimal places leftward, but it was still an oddity and a curiosity.
Some early adopters had "so much" Bitcoin they literally didn't know what to do with it. Some people gave away their BTC and Sats. There were even some people who couldn't give away their BTC fast enough.
However, many early adopters kept their BTC and Satoshi as a show of faith in the concept.
Pre-School
By 2013, the concept of decentralized digital currency as demonstrated by Bitcoin was sound enough that altcoins were forked off the original. Some of these hard forks merely changed settings such as MAX supply and block size. Other hard forks changed more fundamental processes such as the hash algorithm used to add blocks to the chain.
The most notable altcoins from this period are Litecoin, XRP, and Dogecoin.
Even with altcoins on the scene, Bitcoin itself was still attracting miners. I was one of them, and I was using a laptop at home. Many Hivers here had also mined Bitcoin over the years.
What happened to those BTCs and Sats we mined? Heck if I know.
However, even at this point in time Bitcoin was nothing to brag about to the cool kids and their parents.
Early Grammar School
Until this pont, cryptocurrency was merely a tool for making payments. After all, that's one of the main uses of money as well as of fiat currency.
Ethereum came onto the scene, and introduced to the world the concept of smart contracts. Blockchain technology through the tokens being distributed was harnessed to operate on a conditional basis. Many operations which normally required middlemen and bureaucratic procedures were replaced by smart contract technology.
Smart contracts hadn't been considered when Bitcoin was released, and Bitcoin hadn't adopted them. Bitcoin remained a decentralized digital currency meant to be used as a medium of exchange between people.
Even though Bitcoin hadn't incorporated smart contracts, the presence of Ethereum was beneficial for Bitcoin and all other altcoins
Late Grammar School
After a sickly infancy and an awkward childhood, Bitcoin had its growth spurt-- and how!
The financial markets had caught on to Bitcoin, and the USD/BTC exchange rate reflected this interest. Bitcoin had reached USD 0.01, then USD 0.10, then USD 1.00. After that, it was off to the races.
Although there had been a cryptocurrency bear market, years earlier, how many people even knew it existed? This was followed by a bull market, and it took a while for Bitcoin to take off in this bull market.
By this time, cryptocurrency had exploded and altcoins were everywhere. Bitcoin began to be tracked by the financial media. Still a curiosity, this time around Bitcoin itself was considered The Cool Kid or The "It" Girl of this market.
People who had dismissed Bitcoin as an ugly kid had to look twice to make sure that this was indeed Bitcoin. Bitcoin was now turning heads, and increasing rates of bloodflow among many people.
(Into this stage of Bitcoin's life came Hive, but that is a story for another time.)
High School
For most adolescents, high school is when the dating begins. It could be with a steady partner, or it could be trying partners until the right one is found.
Either way, it's the stage of life where the parents earn their grey hairs. Being parents of a teenage son is hard enough. Being parents of a teenage daughter can be harder. In the case of a daughter who has a solar system of boyfriends revolving around her, it's enough for the father to break out the shotgun on the first date.
This is where we find Bitcoin.
In 2022, Bitcoin became a teenager in the final year of grammar school (or, in some places, junior high school). Now that it's 2023, Bitcoin is a teenager beginning its first year of high school.
Bitcoin also has many suitors competing for its attention:
- Exchange Traded Funds are trying to get Bitcoin listed;
- Centralized Exchanges want that Bitcoin action;
- Decentralized Exchanges need Bitcoin for their operations;
- High net-worth individuals want to join the "1 BTC Club";
- Political forms of government want to regulate Bitcoin into submission or oblivion.
Bitcoin is the oldest decentralized cryptocurrency still in use, and we need to protect it from all parties who want "to transform" it or to eliminate it
Just My Two Sats
It's been an interesting 14 years for Bitcoin. At first it looked as if it would disappear due to lack of vision and use case.
Once proof of concept had been achieved it spawned competitors which we know as altcoins.
Even after Bitcoin proved to be the real deal, it was left to its own devices, and it showed in the USD/BTC exchange pair.
One day people noticed Bitcoin and began to see it in a different way. This is when Bitcoin became BITCOIN. From there we know the rest.
If Bitcoin was our teenage daughter who began dating, we would make it clear to her boyfriend that we expect him to protect her honor OR ELSE...
And as we said "OR ELSE" we would look into the boyfriend's eyes while pointing the loaded shotgun in his face.
