Editor's Note: This article comes fromBiaNews(ID: bianews8), reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

Editor's Note: This article comes from

(ID: bianews8), reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

What role does Bitcoin play in the wave of blockchain technology? Everyone has their own answer to this question, and so does Satoshi Nakamoto.

Ten years have passed, if Satoshi Nakamoto is really still thinking in a corner of the real world, will he change his answer in the white paper.

Over the past ten years, Bitcoin has experienced many crises.

The first round took place at the end of 2013, when five ministries and commissions including the People’s Bank of China issued the "Notice on Preventing Bitcoin Risks", which plunged Bitcoin by 87%. Gox was stolen, and the price of Bitcoin plummeted by 83%.

At the end of 2017, Bitcoin reached its highest peak in ten years, and the currency price once exceeded 20,000 US dollars, and then ushered in a new round of troughs.

Bitcoin is no longer a toy for a few geeks, but has become an investment product known to the public and a pioneer of a technological revolution.

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the birth

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin white paper - "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" in his cryptography mail group, and Bitcoin was born since then.

In the past ten years, this niche plaything that was only known to geeks has gradually grown into a huge network with a market value of 100 billion US dollars. The price of Bitcoin itself has increased tens of millions of times, and some people have become rich overnight because of this, while others have lost their fortunes in the plunge.

In 2011, when Bitcoin users gradually grew, its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, chose to "hidden merit and fame".

In the mechanism of Bitcoin, the account address is obtained by hashing the public key again, which reduces the possibility of being cracked by a quantum computer; the elliptic encryption curve chooses secp256k1, which avoids the back door left in advance by the US Security Agency. This also makes Bitcoin regarded as a traverser by some people.

Asymmetric encryption algorithm, P2P network, computing power proof mechanism, many technical cornerstones of Bitcoin have been widely known as early as ten years or more before the release of the Bitcoin white paper. But with the help of Satoshi Nakamoto, these technologies have shown new magic in Bitcoin.

A social experiment was launched. With the different stages of Bitcoin development, geeks, miners, speculators and novices continued to pour in, and sudden wealth, myths, scams, and traps have become keywords in the currency circle where all beings gather.

In addition to getting rich overnight, the biggest shock of Bitcoin to the outside world may be its huge consumption of electricity.As early as 2013, the computing power of Bitcoin's entire network has surpassed the world's Top500 supercomputers. Today, the global electricity consumption for Bitcoin mining exceeds that of most sovereign countries in the world.Electricity Bills Become Bitcoin's

"Value Based"

The world currency status of the U.S. dollar is maintained by nuclear warheads, military bases, and aircraft carrier battle groups all over the world. In comparison, what is the electricity cost of Bitcoin?

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crisis

However, the Bitcoin network based on computing power and network maintenance is likely to be easily shaken in an unexpected way.

This made people discover an embarrassing fact in the Bitcoin world-the value standard of Bitcoin based on the PoW protocol has always been maintained by the electricity required for the mining machine to work. As the difficulty of Bitcoin mining increases, if the price of Bitcoin keeps falling, mining will eventually become a job that cannot make ends meet.

No one wants to be in a losing business. Although the shutdown of some Bitcoin mining machines will not lead to the demise of the Bitcoin network, it will not cause the remaining Bitcoins to never be dug out.

However, the departure of these nodes will directly reduce the efficiency and stability of the Bitcoin network—this is undoubtedly a disaster for Bitcoin whose transfer confirmation time and transaction fees have just dropped to normal levels.

People began to question the nature of Bitcoin. If a drop can shut down a large number of Bitcoin mine owners, what is the cornerstone of Bitcoin’s existence?A new mechanism based on user "consensus", a widely recognized decentralized currency, why would a large number of nodes be shut down after only one drop?

On social networks, more and more people began to discuss a question——

"Will the value of Bitcoin go to zero?"

However, for mine owners who have invested a lot of money to purchase mining machines, electricity costs may only be part of the cost of Bitcoin mining.

Behind the crisis, Bitcoin supporters have also discovered a new fact - Bitcoin mines, as direct holders of computing power, are increasingly controlling Bitcoin. A product that was touted as a "decentralized" currency at the beginning of its appearance began to fall into a situation that was more centralized than legal currency.

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stray

Like the Internet, Bitcoin was born under the aura of "decentralization", but in the end it failed to realize the dream of "decentralization".

In the PC era, Microsoft has always been the center of the industry; in the mobile era, the center began to migrate to Apple and Google; in the Internet era, FaceBook and Amazon have become the new overlords. In China, people cannot talk about the Internet without BAT.

In the early years, people described surfing the Internet as "surfing", and the Internet itself is as full of exploration spirit as the ocean. Internet pioneers who believe in decentralization have built floating islands on the ocean, but in the end, only large landmass ruled by giants remain.

It took the Internet 20 years to complete the path from "decentralization" to "centralization", and Bitcoin completed the fate of "centralization" in a shorter period of time.

The geek attribute of Bitcoin has opened a new door for programmers, and at the same time it has set a lot of entry barriers for outsiders.

Before the story of Bitcoin making people rich overnight appeared, Bitcoin holders used their technical beliefs to support everything in this emerging technology, and also monopolized the wealth of Bitcoin.

Obviously, there is a huge risk of artificial manipulation of Bitcoin prices. For Bitcoin oligarchs, there is nothing more profitable than constantly harvesting leeks.

This makes people wonder, how much of Satoshi Nakamoto's original intention is left?

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rebirth

In Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision, the Bitcoin network will be built on countless personal computers, and each user can freely act as a Bitcoin miner or a simple accounting node.

This is a network system that breaks the monopoly of minting power and allows everyone to trade freely through computers and the Internet.

Bitcoin's original believers started using their home computer CPUs to mine, but Bitcoin's best CPU days didn't last long.

At the end of 2010, it was discovered that the use of GPU can obtain higher mining efficiency; shortly thereafter, the application-specific integrated circuit (ie, mining machine) for Bitcoin mining appeared, and the era of personal mining gradually declined.

Bitcoin has become a peculiar currency based on the "electricity standard".

In Southwest China, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, bitcoin mining farms have contracted entire power stations for mining; Siberia and Canada, where the temperature is cold and easy to dissipate heat, have also become a paradise for bitcoin miners.

With high energy consumption and poor scalability, Bitcoin has been criticized by more and more people. However, in the history of digital currency, Bitcoin still has become a well-deserved overlord by virtue of its first-mover advantage.

For nine years, the Bitcoin network has been functioning well, and the sheer number of Bitcoin fans has grown day by day.

Attempts to transform Bitcoin have also continued in the past ten years, and the Bitcoin network has also ushered in many challengers. Although the price of Bitcoin has increased tens of millions of times in the past ten years, the proportion of Bitcoin in the total market value of digital currencies has been decreasing.

Litecoin simply and rudely reduces the block generation time of Bitcoin to increase the speed of transaction confirmation. Ripple has brought a new consensus mechanism, which reduces the transaction confirmation time to the second level. ETH enables developers to deploy dApps on the blockchain through smart contracts.

It seems that after Bitcoin, every digital asset built on the blockchain has more technological advancement than Bitcoin. Compared with the siege of governments and the hype of bookmakers, these new generation digital currencies seem to be the real enemy of Bitcoin, but they are also the contribution of Bitcoin.

Governments of various countries have also begun to try research on central bank digital currencies, and digital currencies have been regulated and recognized in more and more countries and regions.

Most importantly, Bitcoin sparked a wave of new technology called blockchain. This new technology, which is considered to be the next technological revolution of the Internet, has attracted worldwide attention.

Today, in many fields such as finance, games, warrants, insurance, etc., the blockchain has begun to show its charm.

Although big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies can perfectly solve most of the problems in these fields, the blockchain has given more imagination and possibilities.