1. 新世紀

it’s a new world

The Bitcoin of 2020 is a completely new world compared to the Bitcoin of 2018. There are two important ways the game has changed:

Protocol: What is the protocol capable of doing? Consensus: What are miners willing to do?

The recipe for success is when the protocol is capable of encoding all kinds of monetizable things and concepts, and miners are willing to mine as many such transactions as possible.

Protocol

As of the February Genesis update, all bitcoin script limits are gone. With the protocol limits gone, Bitcoin has become a full-fledged economic computer.

And we are starting to see very interesting server-less computation protocols and tools emerge which take advantage of these new opcodes. Here’s an example of a crazy complex script which implements a “dead man’s switch” smart contract:

Bitcoin is not about “store of tulips”. It’s about encoding, storing and computing “any thing” of the world. And with the protocol limits gone, this is quickly becoming a reality.

Consensus

Just because the protocol limits are gone doesn’t mean everything is solved.

At the end of the day, the miners should be willing to mine these new types of transactions. Also, the miners should signal their dedication to unbounded scaling of the network. Both have started happening (red line):

Of course, there’s still a long way to go and there still exist limits imposed by the miners. For example, we have yet to see file uploads larger than 1MB mined by the miners.

But the key here is that if a miner wakes up one day and feels like letting go of these limits, they can. And once one miner starts doing this successfully, other miners will quickly follow, in order to compete. It’s not a matter of whether it will happen or not. It’s a matter of when.

So what does this mean for us? It means it’s a new world, and everything changes. What got us here won’t get us to the next level.

Everything changes at scale

There are two types of challenges when it comes to dealing with Bitcoin at scale.

1 horse-sized duck: Processing one huge transaction 100 duck-sized horses: Processing millions and billions of diverse transactions

Let’s start with 1 horse-sized duck — how do we process large sized transactions? You store them as files.