When technology or companies become stagnant with their innovation, they slowly fade away and get overtaken. This is a story that we have seen being played out time after time. IBM was overtaken by Apple and Microsoft. Yahoo was overtaken by Google. Ford could soon be overtaken by Tesla, and the list goes on. Many Bitcoiners don’t like to admit it, but there was a strong chance that Bitcoin was also moving on this same trajectory. For years the blockchain had seemed content with either slow development or none at all. Many already considered it to be a nearly finished product. That the Bitcoin blockchain was pristine and should be altered in the slightest.
Over the years the most controversial aspect of Bitcoin development has been the blocksize debate. Whether Bitcoin should increase its blocksize that not only would make sending transactions faster and cheaper. But would also open up the possibility to do even more on the blockchain. Or keep the block size the same, instead focusing on keeping Bitcoin the most decentralized and secure as possible by making it the most accessible for anyone to run a node. This was the debate during the blocksize wars of 2017 and eventually resulted in Bitcoin Cash forking from Bitcoin. The small blockers had won, and we thought that was the end of it.
Bitcoin Lightning was supposed to be the next big thing that would allow Bitcoin to scale, without the need to alter the Layer 1. But over the last 6 years, Lightning hasn’t developed or been adopted the way that we thought it would. With the recent explosion of development on Bitcoin due to Ordinals and BRC20 taking the market by storm. This has resulted in transaction costs on Bitcoin soaring to unprecedented levels. All of a sudden, block-size debates in Bitcoin have returned.
While in the past, these block-size wars divided the market and nearly destroyed Bitcoin. However, today it very well could be the best thing to ever happen to Bitcoin.
The reason is that for far too long, the issue of Bitcoin being slow has been largely ignored, or even accepted as something that would never change. We had acknowledged that Bitcoin was a store of value similar to gold, and it actually wasn’t necessary for it to be fast. After all, the only thing that most people did was their Bitcoin was buying it and holding it to preserve their wealth.
But, Ordinals and BRC20 coming to Bitcoin changed everything. People began storming over to Bitcoin not just to buy and hold, but actually use it for other purposes. It has been receiving record high-levels of development, and innovation has never been higher. Finally, attention is being paid to issues that have been long overlooked. Lightning does have the potential to be exceptional if fully developed and adopted. But, until recently Bitcoin was cheap to use and therefore the need to use Lightning was there. That is changing now. With fees and demand surging, Binance was forced to announce that they will soon be implementing Lightning. But, that is only the beginning.
With all of that said the real achievement throughout this is that it has completely changed the mindset in Bitcoin. There is no denying that development on Bitcoin had become stagnant in recent years, and much slower than we would like. Bitcoin SegWit was implemented in early 2018, and the next major update was TapRoot in late 2021. With recent developments, the Bitcoin mindset has begun to shift from a way of thinking that we must not harm the blockchain, to a mindset that anything is possible. Development on Bitcoin is officially Bitcoin. It is a throwback and reminder of the original way of thinking when it was first created.
All of this has made the Bitcoin market much more exciting. While prices might not reflect it quite yet. In the future, this will be a very bullish factor.
How about you? Are you a fan of the recent development happening on Bitcoin?
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