In 2018 alone, Bitcoin, according to at least twenty analysts, journalists and other “experts”, is either doomed, dying or dead. It has failed, they say, and has no future. In fact, since around 2011, it has died 249 times.
Yet the Bitcoin Blockchain doesn’t know this. It is quietly and consistently collecting, compiling, and verifying transactions in its ledger, creating new blocks every ten minutes or so, practically non-stop. It has an uptime of 99.992044937 % since its inception in January 3rd, 2009, to be exact.
By the time I finish this article, it would have issued new bitcoins as a reward to the miners who added the latest block, just as it has done since 2009 without fail.
Ten minutes after the price of Bitcoin “crashed” to $8,500 (as of this writing), it also added a new block to the chain and it will keep doing so until, well, until it doesn’t. Transactions were made, bitcoins were sent, bitcoins were received.
The Blockchain doesn’t care. There is no plug to pull. It has no feelings. But every ten minutes, it takes a step forward. Every ten minutes, it increases its value and the strength of its network. No person or institution can stop this. Every ten minutes, it trudges forward. Every ten minutes, the ledger is verified and updated. It does what it set out to do, no more, no less.
As Bitcoin and the Blockchain moves forward, so does the industry behind it. Thousands of developers, entrepreneurs, investors, and users are building it as I write this. Transactions, hash rate, price, users, wallets, exchanges, developments — on all of these fronts, Bitcoin software continues to accelerate. Lightning, Segwit, Schnorr, TumbleBit, MimbleWimble, and more are being developed by the best engineers in the world to make the network scaleable for global commerce.
The Blockchain doesn’t care about the price of a Bitcoin, or to what the media says about it— there is work to do now, and every ten minutes thereafter, for as long as it is running. Until it actually stops, then it hasn’t. It just keeps moving forward, one block at a time.
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*I wrote the first version of this on Linkedin almost exactly two years ago. Bitcoin had reached its bottom of $180~, two years after it hit $1,200, and its top developer went out in public to quit and say it hass failed. Don’t worry about the price of Bitcoin today, it doesn’t matter in the end. Nothing can uninvent this technology.