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In less than twenty years, Bitcoin managed to become a widely spread technology.
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It still has a very long way to go to widespread use in society.
We are in the 16th anniversary of the publication of the original Bitcoin paperin which the idea was first presented to the email list of cypherpunks by Satoshi Nakamoto. This has been a very special year, marked by the fourth halving and for a new phase in the legitimacy and hegemony of the first Cryptocurrency. Rather than doing an exhaustive historical analysis, I am going to take a somewhat personal tour of how I experienced those stages while they happened. My intention is to reflect the climate of each era, beyond the great events or “canonical events” of this history.
2009-2013: a rare coin appears on the (deep) web
If Bitcoin was a pretty outlandish topic for at least five years, the previous decades of advances cypherpunks They were even more so. The Internet was ceasing to be a space with a diversity of servers, in which you had to find everything in a search engine or your friends recommended this or that site; to begin to be a centralized space on a handful of large platforms, as we know it today. Just at that moment another internet appeared.
The “Deep web”, which is accessed with the TOR browser, was surrounded by myths in 2010. It was said that there were viruses everywhere, that there were hackers lurking or that they could put you in prison just for entering. The reality is that it was a very slow website, full of controversial content (many times for the sole reason of being controversial), without search engines, but with a wiki that listed sites, a curious mix between that first internet that I did not experience and the called web 2.0.
Among other things, there were many clandestine markets on the deep web in which payment was made with bitcoin. It was difficult to understand what the bitcoinswhere they were bought or how they worked. That’s why many, even if they are big nerds, We didn’t pay much attention to it in those days.
2014-2017: have you heard of Bitcoin?
Little by little, the Bitcoin issue began to gain momentum over the following years: the groups that promoted its adoption began to become popular and have more substance, the price rose considerably and attracted the attention of some risk investors, news portals began to publish notes on the subject. News media dedicated to the topic were even created, such as CriptoNoticias.
However, the prevailing narrative continued to associate Bitcoin with the Deep Web markets or treated it as a simple scam. With more information available, several we begin to understand the sociopolitical implications and the technical marvel that is Bitcoin and we got excited. We believed that the hyperbitcoinization It was just around the corner. The narrative cryptoanarchist It managed to permeate, through Bitcoin, far beyond that group of cypherpunks on the email list. Several of us who began to become obsessed with the topic became “that guy who always talks about Bitcoin” to our friends and acquaintances, but few really paid attention to us or got very involved in the topic.
Let’s also say that the user experience was still not the best: almost exclusively self-custody wallets, manual fees, confirmation times. Although a Bitcoin wallet had a graphical interface and was not command line, it was not a program that anyone could use. Furthermore, the way to buy bitcoins was almost exclusively P2P, so few wanted to “enter” or “invest” (buy) without being sure they could “exit” (sell).
As if it wasn’t difficult enough trying to explain Bitcoin, Altcoins and all their varieties began to appear around this time: stablecoinprivacycoin, memecoin, shitcoin. With enormous venture capital behind them, many of these foundations/companies promoted their listings and managed to attract a much larger audience in much less time. The first wave was the mania of Ethereum-defi-inversiones/”>ICO in 2016, which ended up exploding in 2017, when Bitcoin first touched USD 20,000.
2018-2022: the rise of crypto
The “crypto winter” of 2018 is perhaps the one that many of us suffered the most, if only because it was the first crash we experienced. Going from USD 20,000 to USD 5,000 seemed like a definitive defeat, even though we had bought at less than $1,000 a couple of years before. However, The crypto-bros did not give up and came back recharged with DeFi, NFT-non-fungible/”>NFTsyield farming and tons of new ideas to change the world while getting rich in the process.
Bitcoin remained something best left untouched, both software and asset. I mean, it was a good asset to keep, but it’s better to leave it in a cold walletwhile all of these new currencies had some investment mechanism associated with them. The software also, after the great block size debate that forked the chain in 2017, no one wanted to propose major changes to the source code. Despite this, they were developing Blockchain/”>lightning network and taproot at a perhaps very slow pace compared to the crypto mania. It seemed that the cryptoanarchist narrative was going to be diluted among the slogans of the cryptobros.
Around this time many people began to ask about Bitcoin or crypto in general and we saw how so much grandiose narrative was almost of no use next to the promise of doing “the business of your life.” Suddenly many of us find that those people to whom we had talked about Bitcoin for years without convincing them suddenly They came ready to get involved in any new coin that appeared.
Shortly after, in 2021, El Salvador converted Bitcoin into currency legal tender, opening a new window to its legitimacy. Despite this, Bitcoin was still somewhat “boring” compared to the effervescence of DeFi.
The FTX crash For me, it is the moment that marked the end of that exaggeratedly optimistic cycle. Although we had seen pumps and dumps everywhere during those years, FTX was so big and attracted so many businesses that it was the bucket of water that the space needed to understand that easy money was an illusion.
2022-2024: there is no second best
After that crash, there was no crypto winter as prolonged as in 2018. Bitcoin resumed its predominant place in the space and began to distinguish itself more from the rest of the cryptocurrencies. “Serious” actors within finance and the traditional economy began to talk about “Bitcoin, not crypto.” By this time, a large amount of literature on Bitcoin had already accumulated, in various fields of knowledge. Although they have different perspectives, in general the central ideas of cypherpunks are made explicit. In all this time, furthermore, Bitcoin’s detractors have not elaborated or refined their arguments to convince us that the fiat system is better. Even in the field of ecology, bitcoiners have managed to change the nocoiner narrative of excessive spending to show how Bitcoin is a key factor in the energy transition and the use of resources.
We thus arrive at 2024, the year in which Bitcoin burst into traditional finance with greater force. While Bitcoin futures markets had appeared in 2018, the ETFs They were a much longer battle. The US SEC was opposing them for years, until finally in January of this year they had to reluctantly approve them.
In the field of usability is where perhaps we have the greatest advances. A Bitcoin wallet today is as easy to use as any mobile or desktop app, including self-custody and Lightning. Accessibility has become huge and we can teach someone how to receive and send bitcoins over Lightning in a couple of minutes.
Challenges
Bitcoin has made a journey from being an experiment, to being a currency used by a few individuals, to being used by companies and accepted by some states. Despite that, it has only made moderate progress in each of these latter fields. If in 2010 it was rare to find someone who had heard of Bitcoin, in 2020 it was already rare to find someone who had not. This is a fundamental shift in awareness about Bitcoin, but We are still very far from being able to call it acceptance or adoption. Everyone has heard of it, but relatively few are actively using it.
I think that has to do with three steps we had to climb to make Bitcoin useful: technical, user experience and regulatory.
The technical challenge is constant and infinite: We can always improve something and there are always new features or new bugs to fix. Despite that, we can say that Bitcoin (both the core protocol and its complementary technologies) have already surpassed a threshold at which they technically work.
The user experience can be more important than what runs behind it: A technically perfect program that lacks a good user interface probably won’t be used by many people. Likewise, a good user interface can forgive many technical defects in software. In this sense, a large number of wallets, as I said, already offer intuitive and simple usability for new users.
Lastly, despite these great strides in usability, many Bitcoin wallets and service companies are suffering limitations due to legal uncertainty around the protocol. A paradigmatic case is that of the Strike application. The application boasts of using Bitcoin technology to allow payments from one country to another, but it is only enabled to operate in some of them, so the actual utility ends up being much less than what would be technically possible due to regulatory limitations. .
Because of that, I consider that the challenge of the coming years will be to achieve appropriate regulatory frameworks to use Bitcoin freely and self-sovereignly, and we can explore the true potential of Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to its author and do not necessarily reflect those of CriptoNoticias. The author’s opinion is for informational purposes and under no circumstances constitutes an investment recommendation or financial advice.
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