Main takeaways:
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Bitcoin evolves over two hours: slow consensus-driven changes at the core layer, and fast experimentation at the edges.
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Major upgrades (like Taproot) arrive through careful soft forks after a long review.
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Fast transitions like Lightning payments and Ordinals happen without changing the fundamental rules of Bitcoin, which is why headlines move faster than L1.
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The “50-year” line is a signal to look at where change has occurred, whether in the core protocol or at the edge, before judging whether Bitcoin has actually changed.
On November 10, 2025, David Schwartz, Ripple’s chief technology officer, posted a deadpan on X: “Bitcoin is not the same now as it was 50 years ago.”
The mask works because Bitcoin (Bitcoin) was launched in 2009, so the phrase “50 years” is obviously a bit of irony, but it arrived because it pointed to a larger truth about how people talk about Bitcoin’s evolution.
Schwartz’s sarcastic remark came in a thread arguing that “1 BTC = 1 BTC” and that volatility exists in terms of fiat currencies, not in Bitcoin’s own unit of account. This framework often fuels absolutist ideas about whether Bitcoin will ever change.
Did you know? Rajat Soni, XRP critic (XRP), is a CFA and Bitcoin-focused financial commentator who is active on X.
The joke reveals the timeline confusion
Schwartz’s line works because it highlights the mismatch in how people think about time in cryptocurrencies.
The headlines make it seem as if Bitcoin changes overnight, but the fundamentals it stands on do They were built over decades:
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Public key cryptography (Davy Hellman, 1976)
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Merkel Trees (1979)
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Proof-of-work precursors such as Hashcash (1997 and 2002)
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Diagrams of digital money such as Wei Dai’s B-money (1998).
Bitcoin’s 2008 design combined decades of cryptographic work into a single operating system. Once a truly valuable protocol reaches scale, change slows because coordination costs rise sharply. Researchers and builders now refer to this dynamic as “protocol ossification.”
This slow pace may seem like nothing is ever changing, but that is not the case. A useful way to think about it is Lindy effectwhich says that the longer an indestructible technology remains, the more likely it is to survive. This is why long-standing building blocks, such as public key cryptography and hash trees, continue to support newer systems. But the Lindy effect is merely a heuristic, not a promise. It describes survival, not determinism.
So, when you zoom out, the joke is a reminder of that Bitcoin evolution It operates on two different rhythms: the decades-long lineage of its base ingredients and the faster cycles we see in today’s news.
Did you know? The decoupled witness (Bitcoin Improvement Proposition 141) was activated on August 24, 2017, fixing transaction malleability and enabling capacity and rapid improvements.
What’s changing at Bitcoin’s core (and how)
At the base layer, Bitcoin changes, but only slowly and with broad consensus.
Most promotions are Soft prongswhich tightens the rules imposed by the contract. Soft forks create coordination risks between different versions of the software. To minimize disruption, the community has spent years improving activation methods such as the BIP-9 and BIP-8 release bits.
In practice, change moves from discussion and specification to testing, and if there is clear support, an activation window is created where miners and economic nodes signal readiness.
main root It is the clearest recent example. Proposed years ago and implemented in November 2021, it added Schnorr signatures and a new output type that improves efficiency and privacy without violating existing rules.
The path from idea to activation requires extensive review and a signal period for miners before the rules are actually activated. It shows that upgrades arrive, but only after patient consensus is built.
Today’s debates such as re-enabling “OP_CAT” or introducing “OP_CTV” (Pep-119), follow the same pattern: proposals for increased programmability undergo public research, risk analysis and social review before any activation is considered.
The process is as much about coordination between moderators, reviewers, miners, and users as it is about the code.
Did you know? Bitcoin Script is not Turing complete, which limits complexity to keep verification predictable and secure for all nodes.
Where rapid change occurs
The pace accelerates once you move away from the base layer of Bitcoin.
Payment channels move transactions off-chain, routing them across a network and only touching Layer 1 as backing. This is why the accelerated network iterates much faster than the agreed changes. Its underlying mechanisms, including segmented time lock contracts and newer methods, such as point time lock contracts (PTLCs), allow value to move across intermediaries without trust.
PTLC replaces hash-based secrets with elliptic curve points, giving channels better privacy, more flexible routing, and the ability to split payments across multiple paths. Since these improvements are in implementations rather than the underlying protocol, they can evolve Without a unanimous vote is difficult.
Ordinal and inscriptions Showing the same rapid dynamic from another angle: the emergence of new behaviors using existing rules. Casey Rodarmor’s scheme digitizes satoshis and attaches data to them through Taproot era scripting, creating holdings without changing the Bitcoin consensus. This is why this phenomenon can explode culturally, while the basic protocol remains unchanged.
Both examples highlight the pace of division implied by the joke: Layer 2 and client-side systems can add features, improvements in user experience, and even new markets at high speed, while the underlying layer changes rarely and deliberately. The main titles tend to follow the edge, such as Lightning upgrades or waves of sprites, while the core of the series progresses in carefully orchestrated steps.
The deeper lesson
Schwartz’s phrase “50 years of Bitcoin” sticks because he compresses how cryptocurrencies have truly evolved into a single joke: a slow, conservative core that rarely changes, and a fast, innovative feature that changes.
Slow kernel by design. Once a monetary protocol has billions at stake, updates only move after lengthy review and broad social consensus, a dynamic that has been widely discussed as glorifying the protocol.
However, slow is not the same as stuck. There are concrete paths to change, such as a soft fork path for new opcodes like “OP_CAT” and “OP_CTV,” which could expand the programmability of Bitcoin transactions. These follow multi-quarter or multi-year timelines rather than news cycles.
Meanwhile, new behaviors can break out at the edges without compromising consensus. The arrangements and inscriptions did just that by numbering the satoshis and attaching the data using already established rules.
Forget the years. Think of the note as a decoder. If a claim about Bitcoin “changing” doesn’t specify where (core or edge) and how (consensus upgrade or emergency use), it is missing the point of the joke.
