Key Takeaways
- Bitcoin’s evolution operates on two distinct timelines: gradual, community-driven changes at its base layer and rapid innovation on the periphery.
- Significant upgrades, like Taproot, are implemented through cautious soft forks following extensive review periods.
- Rapid developments, such as the Lightning Network and Ordinals, occur without altering Bitcoin’s fundamental protocol rules.
- The concept of Bitcoin’s 50-year evolution serves as a reminder to distinguish between core protocol changes and advancements occurring at the network’s edges.
Understanding Bitcoin’s Dual Evolution Pace
David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO, humorously noted on November 10, 2025, Bitcoin is not the same now as it was 50 years ago. While Bitcoin launched in 2009, making the 50-year mark a clear jest, it tapped into a broader discussion about how Bitcoin evolves and how we perceive that change.
Schwartz’s remark emerged from a conversation about the principle that 1 BTC = 1 BTC, emphasizing that volatility is a characteristic of fiat-denominated prices, not Bitcoin’s intrinsic value. This perspective often leads to polarized views on whether Bitcoin truly changes over time.
The Joke Highlights Timescale Discrepancies
The effectiveness of Schwartz’s quip lies in its exposure of how we often misunderstand the timeframes involved in crypto development. Headlines might suggest overnight transformations, yet the foundational technologies underpinning Bitcoin were developed over many decades.
- Public-key cryptography, pioneered by Diffie-Hellman, dates back to 1976.
- Merkle trees, a crucial data structure, emerged in 1979.
- Early proof-of-work concepts, like Hashcash, appeared in 1997 and 2002.
- Digital cash concepts, such as Wei Dai’s B-money, were conceptualized by 1998.
Bitcoin’s 2008 whitepaper synthesized these decades of cryptographic innovation into a functional system. Once a protocol achieves significant scale and value, the cost of coordination for changes increases dramatically, leading to a slower pace of evolution. This phenomenon is often termed protocol ossification by researchers and developers.
This deliberate slowness can sometimes give the impression that nothing is changing. However, it’s more accurate to view it through the lens of the Lindy effect, which posits that the longer a non-perishable technology endures, the greater its expected future lifespan. This principle explains why foundational elements like public-key cryptography and hash trees continue to support new systems. However, the Lindy effect is a descriptive heuristic, not a guarantee of perpetual existence.
💡 Therefore, the humor in Schwartz’s statement serves as a reminder that Bitcoin’s evolution incorporates both the long-standing lineage of its core cryptographic components and the accelerated pace of contemporary development.
✅ Segregated Witness (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 141), activated on August 24, 2017, addressed transaction malleability and paved the way for capacity and Lightning Network enhancements.
Core Bitcoin Protocol Enhancements
Bitcoin’s base layer does evolve, but this process is characterized by cautious deliberation and widespread consensus. Most enhancements are implemented as soft forks, which refine the existing rules enforced by network nodes. These upgrades carry coordination risks between different software versions.
To mitigate disruptions, the Bitcoin community has refined activation methods, such as BIP-9 and BIP-8 version bits, over many years. The typical pathway for a change involves extensive discussion, specification, testing, and, if clear community support emerges, an activation window where miners and economic nodes signal their readiness.
The Taproot upgrade, activated in November 2021 after years of proposal and development, stands as a prime recent example. It introduced Schnorr signatures and a new output type, boosting efficiency and privacy without invalidating prior rules. The journey from conception to activation required thorough review and miner signaling, underscoring the deliberate nature of base-layer changes.
Current discussions around reenabling functionalities like “OP_CAT” or introducing new ones like “OP_CTV” (BIP-119) follow the same pattern: incremental proposals undergo extensive public research, risk assessment, and social consensus-building before any activation is even considered. This process emphasizes coordination among developers, reviewers, miners, and users as much as the code itself.
💡 Bitcoin’s scripting language is intentionally designed to be non-Turing-complete, limiting complexity to ensure predictable and secure validation for all network participants.
Rapid Innovation at the Network’s Edges
The pace of innovation accelerates significantly when moving away from Bitcoin’s base layer. Technologies like payment channels enable off-chain transactions, routed through a mesh network and only settling on the main chain as a final recourse.
This architecture allows the Lightning Network to iterate far more rapidly than base-layer consensus changes. Its fundamental mechanisms, including hashed timelock contracts (HTLCs) and newer approaches like point timelock contracts (PTLCs), facilitate trustless value transfer across intermediaries.
PTLCs enhance privacy and routing flexibility by using elliptic-curve points instead of hash-based secrets, enabling more sophisticated payment routing and the potential for splitting payments across multiple paths. Because these advancements are implemented at the application layer rather than the core protocol, they can evolve without requiring a network-wide consensus vote to alter the base rules.
⚡ The emergence of Ordinals and inscriptions exemplifies this rapid edge innovation, demonstrating new use cases by leveraging existing rules. Casey Rodarmor’s protocol assigns unique identities to individual satoshis and allows data to be inscribed onto them using Taproot-era scripting. This process creates digital collectibles without altering Bitcoin’s consensus rules, leading to a cultural explosion while the base layer remained unchanged.
📌 Both the Lightning Network and Ordinals highlight the dual-tempo nature of Bitcoin’s evolution: Layer 2 solutions and client-side innovations can rapidly introduce new features, user experiences, and markets, while the base layer progresses deliberately and incrementally. News cycles often focus on these edge developments, while the core protocol advances through carefully planned stages.
The Underlying Principle
Schwartz’s 50-year Bitcoin statement resonates precisely because it encapsulates the dynamic reality of crypto evolution: a stable, conservative core with infrequent changes, juxtaposed with a vibrant, inventive periphery experiencing rapid development.
The deliberate slowness of the core protocol is a feature, not a bug. When billions of dollars are secured by a monetary protocol, upgrades necessitate lengthy review and broad social consensus, a phenomenon often described as protocol ossification.
Yet, slow does not equate to stagnant. Concrete pathways for improvement exist, such as the soft-fork route for new opcodes like OP_CAT and OP_CTV, which could enhance Bitcoin’s transaction programmability. These developments unfold over quarters or years, not news cycles.
Meanwhile, novel behaviors can emerge at the network’s edges without impacting consensus. Ordinals and inscriptions are a prime example, utilizing existing rules to number satoshis and attach data, thereby expanding use cases without touching the base layer.
📊 When evaluating claims about Bitcoin changing, it’s crucial to ascertain the context: Is the change occurring at the base layer through consensus, or at the edge via emergent use of existing rules? Without this distinction, it’s easy to miss the nuanced evolution that Schwartz’s joke so effectively illustrates.
