2017 marks the eighth anniversary of bitcoin. Although it has dominated the media for years, it’s still too young to be a hot potato compared with gold, stock and fund. And it seems that bitcoin is having the hardest time suffering external and internal troubles. By internal, I mean the hard fork debate and by external, altcoins’ rising market cap. In this light, some experts are claiming that if bitcoin hardforks, it would be dethroned by altcoins or even die.

As a matter of fact, it’s not the first time that bitcoin have been rumored to be destroyed.

Bitcoin price plummeted by 50 percent at the end of 2013 after the collapse of its biggest online exchange Mt Gox. Back then, bitcoin obituaries were all over the Internet. Earlier this year, the price of bitcoin abruptly fell from $1,161 to $889 as People’s Bank of China (PBoC) was stepping up its efforts to regulate the market. And when Chinese bitcoin exchanges have disabled withdrawals of the cryptocurrency, people gathering at forums keep asking if bitcoin is doomed. But bitcoin just refuses to die this way and it has showed the world its resilience. And obviously, what doesn’t kill bitcoin makes it stronger.

Over the past several weeks, as everyone in the community wondering if BU would be activated, bitcoin is unavoidably said to die again. Will a hard fork sentence bitcoin to death? Who knows? But Ethreum’s hardfork may provide some indication here.

Last summer, when Ethereum split into two development groups ETH and ETC, the price of ETH increased from$13 to$16 within three days and now $40. Plus, its original chain is not dead. Though a bitcoin hardfork might be slightly different, I have every reason to believe that it would be easier for BTC and BTU to co-exist.

Anyway, no one knows when exactly will bitcoin hard fork. No one knows which path would miners choose. But I am convinced that this is just one of the many challenges bitcoin must deal with to change the world for better. It’s just like for so many years, some people still argue that bitcoin is not a currency. They believe bitcoin is all imaginary. They cannot hold it in their hands like they do with USD or CNY. They cannot touch it, so they simply couldn’t trust it. To those people, let me ask you this question: Isn’t literature and poetry imaginary? Can you touch them? No, you can’t. Can you touch love or friendship? No, you can’t. How come you believe in those things when you think bitcoin is a sheer joke? Isn’t kind of narrow-minded to think that virtual things or a concept don’t have value?