The 15th anniversary is not just a milestone, practitioners also need to think about how to continue to achieve a completely decentralized future.In the encrypted world, there is a document that holds the status of the Bible and Declaration of Independence, serving as the fundamental blueprint for the entire industry: the Bitcoin White Paper

The 15th anniversary is not just a milestone, practitioners also need to think about how to continue to achieve a completely decentralized future.

In the encrypted world, there is a document that holds the status of the Bible and Declaration of Independence, serving as the fundamental blueprint for the entire industry: the Bitcoin White Paper.

This revolutionary document was written by Satoshi Nakamoto and was released on October 31, 2008, marking its 15th anniversary.

The official name of the Bitcoin White Paper is "Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system", which was introduced after the 2008 global financial crisis, which shattered people's trust in traditional banking business.

Nakamoto's vision is clear - to create a currency that is free from government constraints, censorship, and borders.

This document outlines the blueprint for a decentralized ledger called blockchain in just nine pages and introduces the concept of Bitcoin as a currency. Its clever solution to the double flower problem is to create a decentralized computer network that will validate and record transactions in the public ledger, making them impossible to manipulate.

Since 2008, Bitcoin has not only survived but also flourished, becoming a global phenomenon and the best performing asset of the past decade. It sparked a wave of innovation in the cryptocurrency field, attracting and motivating VitalikButerin and others to try to develop more programmable protocols.

In some countries, BTC has become a means of storing value, digital gold, and hedging against inflation, and is synonymous with words such as hope and freedom. The upper limit of its scarcity is 21 million pieces, which has aroused the interest of participants in various fields. After fifteen years of evolution, Bitcoin has developed into a more complex asset, around which many highly specialized financial products have emerged.

Pit and hardware

The emergence of mining pools can be said to be one of the most obvious "forks" in the blueprint of the white paper.

Nakamoto's initial goal was to enable individuals to use their personal computers to mine Bitcoin. This is still technically correct, but over time, Bitcoin mining gradually revolves around a defining principle: scale.

Nakamoto's initial idea was to ensure that anyone can participate in network validation and security without the need for specialized equipment, making the ecosystem more inclusive and resistant to central control. The rise of mining pools and advanced mining hardware has changed this' original intention ', leading to an increase in centralization.

Nakamoto Cong wrote, "Proof of Work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decisions. If the majority is based on one IP address, one vote, then anyone who can allocate multiple IPs may overturn it. Proof of Work is essentially one CPU, one vote

The first mining pool was initially called bitcoin. cz and later renamed SlushPool, created by Marek "Slush" Palatinus in 2010 to address the issue of people starting to use GPUs instead of CPUs to mine Bitcoin. The mining pool should help independent miners find blocks, even if they cannot use high-performance computers.

GPU mining continued to thrive in early 2010, until CanaanCreative released the world's first dedicated integrated circuit (ASIC) for Bitcoin mining.

Over the years, the efficiency of ASICs has been continuously improving, which has led to the cost of these specialized equipment rising to tens of thousands of dollars. In addition, supplying them with electricity requires a large amount of electricity. This actually makes Bitcoin mining completely unprofitable for independent miners at home.

Nowadays, large companies seem to dominate the mining industry - albeit completely digital.

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal

Leaving aside completely different mining dynamics, the mechanisms of the Bitcoin network have also undergone changes over the past decade or so.

In 2012, the Bitcoin network introduced PayToScriptHash (P2SH) through BIP16 to simplify multi-signature transactions. Before the emergence of P2SH, multi signature transactions were both cumbersome and prone to risks, requiring the disclosure of the entire redemption script (defining expenditure conditions) in advance.

Through P2SH, users send funds to standardized Bitcoin addresses representing redemption script hashes, hiding their complexity. Only when spending tokens will the complete script be made public and meet its conditions, aiming to simplify transactions, enhance user friendliness, and improve scalability.

Segregated Witness SegWitBitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 2017 1MB 4MB

SegWit opened the door to the 2021 proposal called Taprot. Taprot makes transactions more efficient and private, while also allowing users to participate in more complex transaction types.

Exchanges, ETFs, and traditional instruments

Over the years, the Bitcoin trading market has also become more complex, with various companies offering different products.

The white paper did not mention the possibility of large institutions providing Bitcoin related financial products. Nakamoto's goal is to make Bitcoin an alternative and decentralized trading method, rather than a means for traditional investors to make money.

Not to mention, concepts such as purchasing Bitcoin ETFs essentially mean that users trust their funds to large financial institutions, rather than holding Bitcoin themselves.

Nakamoto's distrust of banks was clarified in the first two sentences of the white paper.

Nakamoto Cong wrote, "Business on the Internet almost entirely relies on financial institutions as trusted third parties to handle electronic payments. Although the system operates well for most transactions, it is still affected by the inherent weaknesses of trust based models.

The market's enthusiasm for spot Bitcoin ETFs can prove that, despite opposing Nakamoto's original intentions, various parts of the crypto ecosystem are eager to establish some connection with this trust model. Due to investors' expectations that Bitcoin ETFs will soon be approved, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) has significantly increased.

Although the United States currently does not allow spot Bitcoin ETFs, Europe launched its first ETF in August 2023.

The Bitcoin Futures ETF has been approved by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) has become the first ETF to be launched in October 2021.

DeFi/Ordinals derived ecology

Bitcoin Ordinals enters DeFi - attempting to integrate older blockchains with digital collectibles or NFT requirements similar to Ethereum.

However, it is impossible to discuss Ordinals without mentioning its predecessor, Counterparty. This protocol was launched on Bitcoin in 2014, and even before the NFT boom in 2021, people could exchange rare digital collectibles. RarePepe is an NFT series inspired by PepetheFrogme, originating from Counterparty.

Of course, at the beginning of Bitcoin, NFT tokens did not exist. However, the 2021 Taprot upgrade allows for faster verification of multi-signature transactions, opening the door to writing text, images, SVG, and HTML on the smallest denomination of Bitcoin (known as "Cong").

Ordinals has achieved great success. On May 1st this year, Ordinals created the largest daily transaction volume of Bitcoin to date.

This record (over 682000 transactions) was later broken in September 2023, with a trading volume of over 703000 transactions on September 15, 2023, while the Ordinal inscription reached a new peak. It should be noted that when Bitcoin was still in its early stages in 2009 and 2010, the average daily transaction volume processed was less than 1000.

The revival of the Bitcoin builder culture, from mining to the Ordinals craze to ETFs, is evident, but many of the same issues that Nakamoto has addressed still exist today.

The 15th anniversary is not just a milestone, practitioners also need to think about how to continue to achieve a completely decentralized future. 15