How did practitioners view the BTC ecosystem in 2010 ten years later?

Author: Bitcoin Podcast Block Digest Lianchuang Shinobi; Translated by: Wuzhu, Golden Finance

This article is an article written by Shinobi ten years ago, which explores what Bitcoin looks like in 2020.

The new year is coming, and with the new year, all the normal discussions on social media revolve around the prediction of “What will happen in 2020!” I want to extend this topic and look forward to the next ten years. But first, I want to take a minute to look back at the past (yes, I know I'm a year late, etc.) and really get to know how much progress things have been made.

Mining and cybersecurity

In 2010, cybersecurity was guaranteed by amateur desktop CPUs, and any large resource-rich participant could easily handle it. By early 2020, cybersecurity was guaranteed by billions of dollars worth of hardware that consumed the collective power demand of small countries and were provided to operators by many different companies, worth billions (although worth a lot of valuations, But that's true). Over the past 10 years, cybersecurity mechanisms have transformed from consumer hardware and amateurs to dedicated ASIC equipment and professionally managed data center operations.

Agreement Development

In 2010, you can send Bitcoin to a public key (or IP address), time-locked transactions (transactions only, not UTXO), and do original multi-signatures that are huge and expensive and even expensive to send. , Oh, right: anyone can spend any coins using OP_RETURN due to an error. Yes, I know there were more features in the scripting system at that time, and I'm talking about what the average person could actually do. In 2020…well, I think I have to point this out:

• Use P2SH to make sending funds cheaper with more advanced scripts such as multi-signatures.

• Lock the actual UTXO time to the absolute block height or UNIX timestamp.

• Lock the actual UTXO time to the relative block height or UNIX timestamp interval (from the date of creation).

• With the help of isolation witness, a transaction without plastic TXID is built for layer 2 protocol/chain transactions. (In addition, since SegWit has its own versioning, we can now upgrade scripts more easily. There are only so many undefined OPs in Bitcoin scripts that can be defined to add new scripting features to Bitcoin scripts. SegWit versioning allows new ones to be used The Witness version adds new features instead of using very scarce undefined OPs.)

• Leverages the basic development version of the Lightning Protocol, this is the second layer enabled by the plastic repair implemented in SegWit.

• Sidechains are actually deployed, where more advanced and/or experimental features can be deployed and tested more easily.

Over the past decade, a large number of foundations have been formed in the core foundation of Bitcoin’s basic network and blockchain. Especially considering the complexity and difficulty of trying to determine an upgrade consensus and then implementing and deploying such upgrades (if any).

Political Relevance

In 2010, Bitcoin was just a trivial highlight on radar. The CIA just noticed it and became interested in it. Their reaction was to ask a developer to give a speech, which resulted in Satoshi Nakamoto missing. Apart from that, people are not following it, politicians are not following it, and most institutions are not following it (except for the Alphabet agency we may not know right now). Bitcoin was unknown at the time.

In 2020… Bitcoin has spawned an entire market and industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The exchange earns billions of dollars in revenue from trading fees. Miners earn billions of dollars through operating investments. Tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of people own Bitcoin (the metrics here are very vague and it is difficult to really extract meaningful information from it). We have gone from being almost uninterested by the CIA to basically every meaningful government in the world that holds regular legislative or committee meetings to discuss bitcoin and everything it causes, including macroeconomic and geopolitical consequences, and how to deal with it as a result of. cryptocurrencies have been launched in various countries. All countries have approved cryptocurrency addresses. They officially sat on the negotiating table. Back in 2010, there was only one institution known for snooping around (we know), and now the world is paying attention.

Things have changed. As the metaphor says, good luck, don't let the train stop.