SPOILER ALERT: Jeff Booth does not know what the world will look like in 2036.

I know, I know… You probably wanted to hear from Jeff — author of The Price of Tomorrow and someone with incredible foresight and vision — that all eight billion of us would be living in the type of abundance he often talks about on podcasts.

You likely wanted to read that Jeff foresees Bitcoin replacing fiat by 2036 and that we’ll all be able to just kick back and relax as we enjoy living in a deflationary system by then.

I, too, was slightly disappointed when he didn’t paint a picture of a Bitcoin-fueled utopia that will exist a decade from now.

That said, in true Jeff Booth fashion, he offered some perspective that was perhaps even more profound than expected:

“It can exist for them right this second,” said Jeff in regard to when people can begin to reap the benefits of existing in a Bitcoin-buoyed system. “The question is ‘Do people move their time and energy to this new system?’”

Leave it to Jeff, someone who I often refer to as the Eckhart Tolle (author of The Power of Now) of Bitcoin to remind us that we don’t have wait for a day in the far off future when Bitcoin has transformed the world, we can begin to use right now it to transform our own personal world and the worlds of those with whom we engage.

“We are the change,” said Jeff. “We always have been.”

There’s just one caveat to Jeff’s message, though…

To fully experience the benefits that Bitcoin offers, we cannot simply view it as another asset within a broken system, we have to see it for what it actually is: a protocol.

Bitcoin As A Protocol 

According to Jeff, seeing Bitcoin as anything but a protocol will not only result in our not fully benefitting from it, but ultimately in the failure of the protocol itself.

That’s a lot, I know.

Let’s unpack it.

When Jeff looks out at the world, he sees a spectrum of Bitcoin enthusiasts — and, of course, those who will continue to simply dismiss Bitcoin.

The latter will resume focusing their efforts on trying to reform the broken and insolvent system that continues to steal their time and wealth while consistently blaming the powers that be for their lot in life, further handing over their power to those actors in the process.

If you’re reading this article, you’re likely not one of those types. You, instead, exist somewhere on a spectrum of Bitcoin understanding that Jeff has conceptualized.

On one side of that spectrum are those who take risky bets with bitcoin or even with other crypto assets in efforts to get rich quickly. This type lends much of their energy to searching for the next scheme to trade. Very few in this world win big and almost all lose over a longer time horizon.

One level up from that are those who see bitcoin as a store of value. The problem with this perspective is that the asset is trapped within the broken monetary and financial systems instead of replacing them. If bitcoin only remains a store of value, its ownership will continue to centralize over time, leading to a Bitcoin elite, a new breed of kings, as opposed to a world in which all human beings benefit from bitcoin. This scenario will also lead to continued issues with Bitcoin custodians.

“If we continue to have a debt-based system on top of bitcoin, bitcoin will continue to be held by custodians who will get liquidated time and time again as they take risks with their customers’ bitcoin,” said Jeff. “It’ll look like Celsius and BlockFi over and over and over again.”

Finally, there are those who see Bitcoin as a protocol.

They understand that Bitcoin emerges in layers, each of them enabling it to be used more easily and privately as money. It’s those for whom Bitcoin will serve as a true catalyst.

“It’s only if you view Bitcoin through the protocol lens that the world will change for you,” said Jeff.

“Every single other one of those perspectives relies on ‘It’s somebody else, not me.’ But the last one says ‘I create the future from my intention,’” he added.

“So, when we think about 2036, the real question is ‘How many people realize that they have the agency to change the world?’”

While this may seem like a relatively easy question to answer for oneself, it becomes more challenging when considering that we exist in a world that is constantly trying to distract us from what Bitcoin truly is.

Don’t Get Caught

From flavor of the month FUD to hero worship, it’s easy to give up your power.

“People often give their agency away to the likes of those who spread fear around quantum computing breaking Bitcoin or to those talking about how Jeffrey Epstein tried to infiltrate Bitcoin Core,” said Jeff.

Much of the Core vs. Knots debate was also driven by fear, which also siphoned people’s power, according to Jeff. With regard to this particular issue, Jeff noticed the name calling and ad hominem attacks, but opted not to contribute to the drama. Instead, he simply saw it as a signal that the issue was worth investigating. He believes that the debate offered people an important opportunity to fight for what they want Bitcoin to be.

“We’re used to seeing only a small part of consensus and not seeing views that are outside of it,” said Jeff. “The consensus mechanism and the agency of all participants fighting for what they see bitcoin as allows each person to see the entire debate and make their choice of what bitcoin is to them.”

Jeff went on to say that instead of being driven by fear and blindly digging in with one side or the other in such debates, it’s important to look inward at these times. Both doing so and advocating for what you want Bitcoin to be is ultimately how the protocol stays safe in his eyes.

“If there are enough hypervigilant people focused on the issues, Bitcoin stays secure,” said Jeff. “If there are enough people building on this and they are all hypervigilant as they build, it stays decentralized.”

Bitcoin enthusiasts also give away their agency to figures in the Bitcoin space who convince them that bitcoin is nothing more than a store of value — digital capital, if you will — according to Jeff.

“If you talk about digital capital and digital assets or building a debt-based system on top of Bitcoin, you aren’t viewing Bitcoin as a protocol,” explained Jeff. “Building a debt-based system on top of Bitcoin is centralizing, which isn’t good for Bitcoin. If you’re trying to concentrate bitcoin and become a new king, then both Bitcoin and the game you’re playing will ultimately fail.”

Jeff attributes the fact that some aren’t able to see how building a system that resembles the system Bitcoin was designed to replace is ultimately doomed to the notion that many are trapped in old mental models. In other words, we often bring our baggage from the old system into this new one. Those who see Bitcoin as a protocol, those using it as money in Bitcoin circular economies on a day-to-day basis, fundamentally understand Bitcoin through a different lens. They intuitively know that every choice, want, and need is a choice to distribute value or give value. And as bitcoin becomes more ubiquitous as money, then those playing financial games with bitcoin will ultimately be forced to give up their coins.

“You can try to create debt on top of bitcoin, but, eventually, as Bitcoin adoption increases, prices will begin falling so fast that those trying to centralize Bitcoin will have to figure out a way to deliver value to society in excess of what they’re spending to pay back and service their debt, which they won’t be able to do, forcing them to distribute their bitcoin,” said Jeff.

In short, Bitcoin inevitably liquidates those playing a zero-sum game; therefore, according to Jeff, it’s best to focus on what you’re doing to provide value to the world rather than focusing on how prominent figures in the Bitcoin space are rebuilding the same type of debt-based system that we’re trying to escape on top of bitcoin.

Why Bitcoin Remains Decentralized and Secure

For this issue, the editorial staff and writers involved have presupposed that Bitcoin is still sufficiently decentralized and secure come 2036. The truth is, though, as Jeff points out, if we all don’t claim our own power and embrace Bitcoin as a protocol, then it centralizes and fails.

Put another way, Bitcoin is not inevitable.

Yet, at the same time, Jeff is all but 100% convinced that Bitcoin does, in fact, succeed.

Why is that? you might ask.

Well, to use Jeff’s own words, he believes that Bitcoin will win because he “believes in us.”

Now, I know what you might be thinking: How could Jeff believe in us?… I mean, has he seen all the pleb slop out there? Has he seen how quickly many have been to abandon their Bitcoin vision and morals in pursuit of fiat gains? And does he think we’re all as good at thinking for ourselves as he is?

While I didn’t ask Jeff those questions, I’d imagine his answers to the second and third ones are “yes” and that he’s too humble to even respond to the final one. And as for the first question, he answered it without my posing it to him directly.

“As time goes on, more and more people discover what Bitcoin truly is, and each of them begins to move their agency into this space,” he explained. “In the process, people discover that their agency matters and that they can bend reality to their will. And when we share different thoughts about Bitcoin with others, it opens people’s minds, further causing them to shift their time and energy. I’m so positive that Bitcoin succeeds because I believe in the best in us, and I’ve already seen so many people move their time into this space and how that has had such a positive impact on them.”

Still, Jeff, c’mon! Most of us are still simply trying to convince our friends and family members that Bitcoin isn’t a scam, much less something that they should be moving their time and energy into. Even the idea of moving one’s time and energy into Bitcoin seems like an abstract and foreign concept to most people today.

Jeff gets that, too. And so he offered a caveat:

“Not everybody has to move their time — only a small fraction do.”

Now, given that my intention in writing this piece isn’t simply to help share Jeff’s perspective but to encourage you to embrace your own agency and power, I’m not going to share how much that small fraction is composed of in Jeff’s mind. Doing so might put you back into the mindset you may have had before you started reading this piece, the “Bitcoin is inevitable, and my efforts mean nothing in regard to its success or failure” mindset. Since that’s neither productive nor empowering, let’s not go there. The point is that Jeff believes that there are enough of us out there who will “hold the line and fight for freedom” as we work to maintain what he terms “the honest chain.”

“__% of people will cheat and go back to the dishonest chain,” said Jeff. “They’ll tell themselves ‘I needed to do it for my family.’ Deep down, they won’t have wanted to move to the dishonest chain, but they will feel that the consequences of not doing so were just too great. So, they’ll take the bribe. They’ll tell themselves ‘If not me, somebody else will do it, and I have to do it, too.”

Though that remaining percentage of people who support the honest chain may be small, it will be more than enough to have the balance of most people eventually move with them, according to Jeff.

“That small group forces a foundation from which others can benefit,” said Jeff.

A beautiful dimension of Bitcoin is that it’s a group, as opposed to a single figure, that keeps the network safe. And what shields this group is that Bitcoin enables them to remain anonymous. This can be contrasted with public leaders or religious figures who’ve challenged power and been martyred for it.

“Those leaders and religious figures had to be killed because they were open and very dangerous to the system of power,” said Jeff. “Now, those who want to stand up for what’s right no matter what to keep Bitcoin protected can do so because privacy is built into its layers. If this fight were occurring in the open, the intransigent minority, those who want to stand up for what is right, would be knocked off in time; it would be too dangerous for them to stand up.”

In this light, Bitcoin could be viewed as the greatest tool for human liberation we’ve ever seen. And the most exciting part is, we may have all of the components we need to scale it securely and in a manner that offers people transactional privacy.

Scaling Bitcoin: We May Already Have All We Need

Given how often Jeff refers to scaling Bitcoin in layers, I asked him how many layers he envisions Bitcoin having by 2036, anticipating that he had some ideas for layers that few of us could have yet conceptualized.

To my surprise, his answer to my question was direct: “I think we have almost everything already.”

(LFG.)

“We have Bitcoin, composed of energy, mining, and the consensus rules,” began Jeff. “Next, we have Lightning, Liquid, Ark, etc. This is the transport layer where you can now transport value instantly at very fast speeds. On top of or integrated with that, you have fedimints for ecash, the privacy layer. We also have Nostr, the identity layer, web of trust, and privacy layer. And that might be all we require. Everything there is enough to enable all applications to take part in the first global free market that’s ever existed.”

But what about a capital markets layer? Will we see tokenized assets on a Bitcoin layer by 2036, or at any point in the future for that matter?

According to Jeff, that’s a hard “no.”

“Tokenization is part of the fiat scam,” said Jeff. “The idea with tokenization is that people are going to take more assets and drive more money into those assets. In the world I’m talking about, you don’t need tokenization because the protocol preserves value for you — everything is priced in prices that are falling.”

According to Jeff, tokenized assets, whether on traditional ledgers (e.g., brokerage accounts) and on blockchains, are part of the current system, which is extractive. In a world underpinned by bitcoin, people won’t need to rely on tokenized assets to preserve their wealth.

“In this new world, capital markets get way smaller,” said Jeff. “In 1900, capital markets only made up about 1% of the economy, and now it’s closer to 40%. Tokenization helps the extractive economy carry on; it becomes unnecessary in a world in which Bitcoin succeeds as a protocol.”

Jeff contextualized his point by describing how he and the team at ego death capital, the Bitcoin venture capital firm that he co-founded, think about making investments in a world where bitcoin continues to appreciate in value.

“At ego death, we deploy risk capital where we think we can exceed a 45% IRR (internal rate of return),” Jeff explained. (Bitcoin’s IRR over the past 15 years is approximately 45%.) “Most startups don’t get funded with debt. Family and friends typically fund startups and what they’re doing is saying ‘I believe you can do this,’ while not necessarily considering the fact that most startups fail because it’s so hard to create value in the free market. Investors only come in when they see a startup starting to win and when they think a business will provide tons of value moving forward.”

And most investors in public markets today are only investing because fiat currencies are losing value at such an alarming rate. In a world that’s on a bitcoin standard, speculating in markets as a means to preserve value is no longer necessary.

Start Today

Each of our actions in this Bitcoin space have power.

They are helping to chart a course in which, by 2036, there will be exponentially more of us reaping the benefits of living on a bitcoin standard.

While that future surely isn’t promised, Jeff feels confident that we’re on the right path.

“Our future is created by these collisions of us talking to each other, learning from one another, and expanding our knowledge to other people,” he explained.

Plus, the longer Jeff works with and invests in high-integrity builders in the Bitcoin space, the more confident he feels that Bitcoin remains decentralized and secure, as it must for it to succeed.

With that said, Jeff understands that many will sell out as the fight continues to be brought to Bitcoin’s doorstep, which is why he says that we should feel free to “slay our heroes.” Instead, he believes, we should look within ourselves for answers.

The Bitcoin story isn’t one of looking out to or up to; it’s one of looking inward and embracing responsibility and critical thinking, both of which are necessary in pursuit of increased personal power and agency.

If we want a world transformed by Bitcoin in 2036, we have to start by making the essential personal transformations and moving more of our time and energy into Bitcoin today.

Don’t miss your chance to own The 2036 Issue — featuring articles written by many influential figures in the space pondering the challenges of the next decade!

This piece is featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The 2036 Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

This post The 2036 Issue: The Future Is Now, Words of Wisdom from Jeff Booth first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Frank Corva.

By the year 2036, Bitcoin mining looks nothing like it did five years ago, much less ten. Long gone is the model of Bitcoin miners that dominated the landscape of the early to mid-2020’s. These large, often publicly traded, mining companies looked for large tranches of cheap power in mostly first-world countries they could monetize at scale. These corporations did not generate their own energy, nor did most design and manufacture their ASICs. They looked for a confluence of attractive power terms from an electric utility, available land near substation infrastructure, and timed the purchase of ASICs for as short a payback period as possible. 

The compressing margins had already strained this business model by the middle of the decade. Then the explosion of artificial intelligence and high-performance compute (AI/HPC) data centers created a more profitable use of grid connected electricity. This effectively ended the availability of power for public Bitcoin miners in the markets they had adapted for. Many simply took their model and altered it slightly to accommodate the AI/HPC data center buildout. The process was similar, and the companies who successfully pivoted were rewarded by their shareholders. The opposite was true for those public mining companies who failed to build more traditional data centers

As the era of public Bitcoin mining companies ended, governments started to notice the advantages of Bitcoin mining for expanding and managing a national grid. Rapid growth in generation commonly outpaced transmission capacity necessary for broader grid connectivity, creating pockets of electricity that could not be delivered and utilized. Several nations possessed surplus energy at off-peak hours, but deficits during peaks in the morning and evenings. Many of the grids throughout the Global South lacked a buyer or high-capacity transmission infrastructure to export surplus energy on day ahead markets. 

There was a growing realization that mining Bitcoin with the excess electricity was akin to exporting the power over the internet, rendering the expensive cross-border transmission infrastructure unnecessary for this specific sales activity. Countries began to use the design of mineral extraction deals as archetypes. In those arrangements, a joint venture or special purpose vehicle was formed between a foreign mining company and the government. The mining company would extract the mineral, but the country received a royalty in the form of a predetermined percentage of profits given it was the resource of the nation.

The sovereign level Bitcoin mining deals were similar. The surplus power was a national asset just like minerals in the ground, but the difference being the temporal aspect of the electricity. Every hour that excess was not monetized, that electricity was unproductive, thus minutely changing the economics of the power plant that generated the electricity. If hours turned into days, months or even years, the finances of the mostly state-owned electric utilities deteriorated. Countries increasingly followed the pioneering nations like Bhutan into similar sovereign level Bitcoin mining deals as they realized they couldn’t afford inaction.

In the late 2020’s, the U.S. and China played tug-of-war with the world economies via their digital currencies. The Americans exported the dollar through stablecoins, while the Chinese offered cheap debt if denominated in the Renminbi and offered swap lines with countries in the Digital Yuan, their central bank digital currency issued directly from the Bank of China. “Middle powers”, or countries with excelling economies and ability to influence their region but were a rung below great power status, sought to extricate themselves from the middle of the American-Sino economic struggle. For many, Bitcoin was such an escape hatch.

Take for instance the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) legislative proposal in Brazil in 2026. Not only did it codify the country’s ability to put up to 5% of national reserves into Bitcoin, but it also abolished capital gains tax on Bitcoin and allowed payment of taxes in Bitcoin. Other middle powers followed suit with similar adoption measures. By leaning into alignment at the state or citizenry level with a neutral reserve asset not controlled by either America or China, they were able to avoid the trap of choosing one financial system and boxing themselves out of the other. 

For those countries that assumed this strategy and possessed any measure of energy independence, Bitcoin mining became the most cost-effective method of accumulation. Some energy heretofore exported to neighbors was kept for the purpose of Bitcoin mining. Abundant energy potential without nearby offtake or grid connectivity that was previously deemed nonviable for development was now prioritized. Such projects now became a source of pride as they expanded the energy portfolio of the country while simultaneously creating a measure of economic independence.

Examples of this type of adoption were pockmarked all over the globe. Russia partially pioneered the strategy by turning isolated energy production in Siberia into sanction proof assets during the war with Ukraine. Turkey lessened exports to countries like Bulgaria and Iraq and further developed hydroelectric generation in the eastern part of the nation. Brazil and India similarly developed the plentiful hydroelectric potential in the Amazon and Himalayas respectively, far from population centers along the coast. Indonesia and Malaysia finally found a suitable use for the vast geothermal energy on Borneo Island. Ethiopia turned their private electricity sales to Bitcoin miners into more of a state pursuit with profit share between miners and their sovereign wealth fund. 

These state involved Bitcoin mining operations served as a sandbox to advance grid management practices using curtailable electric load or reserve capacity. While pundits for years argued whether battery energy storage systems (BESS) or Bitcoin mining was the better dispatchable demand, it turned out the answer was a combination of the two because of differing and complimentary characteristics. Bitcoin mining can handle large scale load shedding or absorption for long stretches of time, while batteries can respond in milliseconds with precision but lack long-term management ability due to finite storage capacity and limited cycles over their lifespan.

The combination of economic resiliency and grid improvement that these nations enjoyed from Bitcoin mining created envy in their regional neighbors. In about half a decade, sovereign level Bitcoin mining projects went from viewed as risky to essential. Even countries with expensive electricity tariffs found it more economical to institute Bitcoin mining than to deal with the variability of renewables with BESS alone. ASICs, even ones several generations old, sold at a premium for a time as the sudden FOMO-driven demand took hold. Before long, it was more unique to find a ministry of energy without Bitcoin mining integration than one with such a program.

Now that it is 2036, we will experience the next halving event this year in which the block reward will drop to 0.39 Bitcoin per block. Luckily, Bitcoin becoming extremely valuable as a global macro asset, exceeding the market cap of gold, caused nations to use the digital asset as a neutral reserve asset in trade between different economic and currency blocks. This drove more large transfers to the base chain for immutability, subsequently increasing revenue from fee collection which surpassed the value of block rewards. Still, the margins of mining have continued to compress because of global adoption at the state level and created an area of geopolitical competition. 

Early Bitcoin enthusiasts lament the state capture of the mining industry, but unfortunately it was inevitable from a game theoretical perspective. As Bitcoin gained adoption in the underpinning of the global financial system, the production of the asset became an issue of geopolitical importance. No private industry had the ability to compete with national governments in the aspects of scale, coordination and control of energy. In a sense, the only way to avoid the government concentration of Bitcoin mining would have been for the Bitcoin network to stall in its adoption somewhere short of becoming the most prominent neutral reserve asset on the planet. If that had been the case, Bitcoin mining would have remained a private sector industry, but the network would have never gained significance beyond a niche alternative asset. 

That’s not to say that the mining industry is operated completely by governments. Public private partnerships are the backbone of the space, much like the energy industry of ten years ago. While petrochemical companies are private sector entities, they are heavily reliant on licensed government-owned oil and gas deposits. Similarly, independent power providers build electric generation facilities to sell energy for a profit, but they must jump through regulatory hoops and market to an electric utility that is at a minimum under government oversight, if not owned outright. Bitcoin mining began to operate under a similar paradigm in that private companies built and operated the data centers but with government sanctioned contracts outside of very rare circumstances.

The companies making the most profit in the space are those that design and manufacture ASICs. These companies are highly specialized and export controlled in the ways that chip companies were in the 2020s during the initial AI boom. These corporations are domiciled in either the U.S., China, or countries closely aligned with one of the two. Other countries could not compete with the chip design advances and other technological byproducts of the defense tech race between the two great powers.  

Given that mining efficiency is a source of national advantage, the research and development of machines that provide that edge has been partially funded by government grants and spurred by classified technological information. In exchange for that aid, the government disqualifies or approves foreign sales through legislation that looks similar to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) or the CHIPS Act. Access to cutting edge ASICs by countries not sophisticated enough to design and manufacture their own are sweeteners for trade deals much like access to NVIDIA chips were during the AI boom.

While the cypherpunks of the early part of the century would bristle at the nation state involvement of Bitcoin mining, in an odd way the decentralization of the network is as strong as ever. The proliferation of hash rate has guaranteed that no single actor could ever attack the network. Additionally, any emerging threats to the network created by a single nation would quickly supersede disagreements and temporarily unite the rest of the world against that country as a rogue actor threatening the global financial system. While many countries kept their fiat currencies as the backbone of their economies, every country on earth recognizes the value of Bitcoin therefore allowing individuals to live on a Bitcoin standard in every corner of the world. If Satoshi had to choose between decentralization of money or the proof of work algorithm, he likely would have chosen the former. Let’s hope that’s the case at least, because that’s what happened.

This piece is featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The 2036 Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

This post The 2036 Issue: Here Come The Sovereigns first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Jacob Langenkamp.

A coffee shop in Lagos accepts payment in seconds. A manufacturer in São Paulo settles an invoice with a supplier in Ho Chi Minh City. A freelancer in Bangalore receives her weekly pay from a startup in Austin. All of this moves on top of Bitcoin. None of them are thinking about Bitcoin. 

This is 2036. And the most important thing about how money works today is that almost nobody understands how it works. 

Ten years ago, I wrote that Bitcoin would become the TCP/IP of money, an open settlement layer that everything else runs on top of, invisible to the people using it. That comparison turned out to be almost literally correct. 

Trillions of dollars move across the Bitcoin network every day. Most of it is denominated in dollars, euros, reais, naira, pesos, rupees — stablecoins pegged to local and reserve currencies, routed over Bitcoin’s settlement infrastructure. The businesses and individuals on either end of these transactions mostly don’t know. They see their bank, their wallet, their payment app. The protocol underneath is as invisible to them as TCP/IP is to someone checking their email. 

This didn’t happen overnight. It happened the way all protocol adoption happens: driven by necessity in places the existing system failed, then all at once, as the tooling caught up and the economics became obvious. 

The structural shift started with wallets. When Spark made it possible to hold dollars, local currencies, and bitcoin all on a single address in a non-custodial way, it removed the last meaningful friction between these three things. One wallet. One address. Dollars for spending, bitcoin for saving, local currency when you need it. No separate apps, no bridge transactions, no counterparty holding your money overnight. 

That design choice changed the math on global custody. Today a double-digit percentage of all deposits worldwide sit on infrastructure where the depositor holds the keys. This happened because people and businesses were never asked to choose between convenience and ownership. The wallet just worked. The custody model was built into the protocol, not bolted on as a feature. 

Banks used to hold your money because there was no practical alternative. Now the alternative is better. It’s faster, cheaper, and you actually own what’s in your account. The shift was less an ideological revolution than a product one. Better wallets won.

Because all of this runs on Bitcoin’s settlement network, something happened that most people didn’t predict: Bitcoin became the default savings layer for billions of people who were just trying to use dollars. 

The logic was straightforward. You have a wallet. It holds stablecoins and bitcoin. You spend the stablecoins. The bitcoin sits there. Over the past decade, anyone who left money in bitcoin watched their savings outperform any local currency and most investment products. Not because of speculation — because of sustained demand for the only monetary asset with a fixed supply running the protocol layer underneath the global money grid. 

So people saved in bitcoin. Hundreds of millions of them. Then billions. Not because they read the whitepaper or attended a conference. Because their wallet had two balances, and one of them kept going up relative to everything else. The decision to save in bitcoin became as unremarkable as the decision to send money in dollars. Same wallet. Same rails. 

Businesses followed the same path. Corporate treasuries started holding bitcoin alongside their operating stablecoins. First small companies in emerging markets, where currency devaluation made the case urgent. Then larger ones. Then multinationals. The adoption curve tracked the same pattern as enterprise internet adoption in the late 1990s. Once the infrastructure proved reliable, the only question was how much exposure, not whether. 

The newest development is that people are starting to use bitcoin itself for transactions. It’s still early. But the trend became visible this year, and the direction is clear. 

When your savings are in bitcoin and you’re paying someone who also holds bitcoin, denominating the transaction in bitcoin is just simpler. No conversion. No intermediary currency. The payment stays on the network where both parties already hold their money. 

It started in pockets: high-value B2B settlements, freelancer payments, commerce between people who keep most of their wealth in bitcoin. A small fraction of total volume. But when the infrastructure makes it equally easy to send bitcoin or stablecoins, the question of which one to use becomes about which money you trust, not a technical constraint. 

For most of Bitcoin’s first twenty-five years, the maximalist vision was aspirational. People wanted to use bitcoin as money but the infrastructure wasn’t there. Now the infrastructure is there, and the adoption is coming from a direction no one expected. People aren’t starting with Bitcoin ideology and working toward usability. They’re starting with a great wallet that happens to run on Bitcoin, discovering that their savings do better in bitcoin, and then choosing to transact in it because that’s already where their money lives.

The rails created the savers. The savers are becoming the spenders. 

There’s another force accelerating this, and it has nothing to do with human preference. 

Most commerce in 2036 involves AI agents acting on behalf of people and businesses. Your agent books travel, negotiates vendor contracts, pays invoices, manages subscriptions. Millions of these agents transact with each other continuously, and they’ve converged on bitcoin as their preferred settlement asset. Not because someone programmed them to. Because when agents optimize for speed, finality, and minimal counterparty risk across jurisdictions, they arrive at bitcoin on their own. 

The math is simple from an agent’s perspective. When two agents are settling value between their principals, converting through fiat rails adds cost, delay, and trust dependencies. Bitcoin settles in minutes on a global network with no intermediary. Agents figured out what took humans a decade to accept: if both sides already hold bitcoin, there’s no reason to route through anything else. 

Net settlement between agents now accounts for a growing share of daily bitcoin transaction volume. An agent handling purchasing for a German automaker and an agent managing receivables for a Korean battery supplier don’t need dollars or euros or won as an intermediary. They net the obligations and settle the difference in bitcoin. Faster. Cheaper. Final. 

The result is that bitcoin is becoming the native money of machine commerce the same way it became the native savings asset for humans. Both happened for structural reasons, not ideological ones. The protocol is neutral, programmable, and globally accessible. For agents optimizing across millions of transactions a day, that’s all that matters. 

The global monetary system is being rebuilt from the protocol layer up. Open infrastructure. Self-custodial by default. Bitcoin settling everything underneath. Stablecoins as the interface layer. And increasingly, bitcoin as the currency of choice for people who understand where this is going. 

Most people still don’t think about any of this when they send money. They don’t need to.

Don’t miss your chance to own The 2036 Issue — featuring articles written by many influential figures in the space pondering the challenges of the next decade!

This piece is featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The 2036 Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

This post The 2036 Issue: Nobody Even Noticed first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by David Marcus.

As I write this in 2026, the world is becoming more multipolar, and I expect that trend to continue over the next decade through 2036.

In reality, it was this recent unipolar period that was historically anomalous. Starting from the end of World War II in 1945 and especially since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has existed as the world’s sole hyperpower. For the first time in history, telecommunications and industry connected the whole world, enabling a truly global reach.

Prior to that point, multipolarity was the norm. Even during the height of the Roman Empire nearly two millennia ago, there were other similarly powerful regions of the world, including the Han Dynasty and other Asian kingdoms and empires. That was at a time when distance truly mattered, and great powers could exist simultaneously with only limited contact.

The other side of this multipolar aspect of power was the multipolar nature of money. For thousands of years, it was gold and silver, along with lesser commodities, that served as money. There was no sovereign ledger big enough to serve the whole world, and so only nature’s decentralized ledger could suffice.

But in the age of telecommunications, as commerce and money began to flow at the speed of light in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, even gold wasn’t good enough. The United States dollar became the primary currency for cross-border lending and contract pricing, while the United States treasury bond became the primary reserve asset for central banks. People often point to the existence of prior reserve currencies, such as the British pound sterling or the Dutch gilder, but they weren’t the same thing as the dollar. They were proxies for metal, and gold itself was the real reserve currency in those eras. But during this unipolar hyperpower era, the free-floating dollar and its bond market surpassed the known market capitalization of gold and became by far the largest holding in sovereign reserves.

Many people viewed this unipolar era as the end of history, even though of course history never does end. China and India gradually recovered their economic might from the depths of colonialism and war that defined their 19^th and 20^th centuries, with China in particular becoming the world’s largest steel producer, electricity generator, and manufacturer now in the early 21^st century. The United States, meanwhile, suffered from the Triffin dilemma: in order to maintain the world’s reserve currency, the nation must supply the world with units of its currency, which they do by running deficits. Those deficits, and the associated hollowing-out of industry that they contribute to, is what eventually weakens the trust in that currency.

Now, many of those in power in the United States no longer want the costs of issuing the reserve currency, though few would say it out loud. The imbalances have become too great. Meanwhile, the rest of the world doesn’t want their assets to be devalued or frozen, or their liabilities hardened, at the whim of Washington DC. There are no other sovereign entities willing and able to serve as the world’s ledger either, with all the trust that’s required and all the burdens it entails.

And so, here it is that we witness the gradual trend shift back toward multipolarity of money. Gold is the obvious first choice; it’s the only other liquid and divisible store of value that’s big enough. It’s still not fast enough, but nations see that they didn’t have to go as all-in on the dollar as they did. They can hold gold in lieu of treasuries for a bigger chunk of their savings than they have been doing in recent decades. It may have its flaws, but gold can’t be hacked, can’t be unliterally debased or frozen, and lasts forever.

The second choice is a boring but obvious one: diversification. In a world where there are a handful of major economic powers, nations can diversify their fiat currency exposures. They can hold a plurality of currencies and bonds at roughly equal proportion to the size of their trading partners and capital providers. That spreads out risk, both in terms of debasement and in terms of confiscation. The problem here is about network effects: liquidity begets more liquidity, and entities don’t want assets and liabilities denominated in different units, and so money naturally trends toward one wherever possible. A patchwork combination of gold and two or three major fiat currencies collectively serving as the world’s ledger is a workable one, but not an ideal one.

The third potential choice, still in its relative infancy, is Bitcoin. Nature provided slow but decentralized ledgers, sovereigns provided fast but centralized ledgers, and this third method now provides a ledger that is both decentralized and fast. The hyperpower unipolar world occurred at a time when transaction speeds could move at the speed of light, but final settlement could not. Fast global transactions (i.e. IOUs) only require Morse code over telegraph connections, which are very simple and of low bandwidth, while fast global settlements (i.e. irreversible transfers) require much higher bandwidth communications and hard encryption. Now that fast settlement exists at scale, the reliance on central intermediaries to bridge the gap between fast transactions and slow settlements can be reduced.

However, the challenge from this point on is twofold: security and network effects.

Bitcoin’s ultimate security has been questioned from its inception. Will its economic incentives keep it permissionless and decentralized indefinitely, or will it eventually gravitate toward centralized capture? Will its cryptographic assumptions continue to hold? And related to both of those questions: will it be able to gradually update over time despite its decentralization, so that it can remain functional and secure as the world’s computer infrastructure evolves underneath it? At only seventeen years of age, these questions are still unanswered, but those of us who invest in the asset and participate in development either directly or through the financing of development believe that Bitcoin is the best shot we have, and so we try to create the reality we want to see.

Bitcoin’s network effects are strong, but are still limited. These network effects, along with its simple and robust design, have been sufficient to keep it as the largest cryptocurrency for seventeen straight years since inception, with no true competitors anywhere in sight. However, when looking more broadly, it’s still a minnow in an ocean of sharks. The direct user base is in the low millions, in a world of billions. The market cap is in the low trillions of dollars in a global world of assets that has reached roughly a quadrillion dollars. And speaking of dollars, people use the largest and most liquid money as their unit of account, and that remains the dollar globally and other fiat currencies locally. It’s what people’s paychecks are denominated in, it’s what their business contracts refer to, and it’s what fulfills their liabilities.

In order to grow very large, Bitcoin by definition requires upward volatility. With upward volatility comes euphoria and leverage, which create the conditions for periods of downward volatility. This volatile adoption period, which inevitably takes decades as it chips into the existing network effects of the dollar and other large monies, limits its attractiveness both as a unit of account and as a near-term savings device. It serves as an investable asset, as long-term savings, and as the most unstoppable payment and settlement method for products and services that are otherwise denominated in more stable incumbent monies. Bitcoin’s fate during this adoption period rests on the vision of early adopters whose plans are measured in decades. The larger it becomes, the more stable it can be and the more it can function as an accounting unit and near-term savings, but getting there is a long journey.

To the extent that Bitcoin continues to remain strong in the face of security threats, and continues to chip into the incumbent monetary networks, the more attractive it becomes to individuals, corporations, and sovereigns. In 2036, I believe gold will still be desired, as there is a natural tendency to want to own physical, immortal things. And I believe the largest fiat currencies, troubled as they may be, will still be in widespread use: those trains have quite a while to run yet. If it’s successful, Bitcoin in 2036 would be larger than any stock, and would rival the largest currencies and metals in market size.

The biggest challenge to Bitcoin is not governments, not quantum computers, not rogue developers, and not other digital assets. Instead, the biggest challenge, the biggest risk, is us. The people. All people.

In 2036, war, corruption, and tyranny will still exist. However, it’s a question of ratios and numbers. People imagine that governments impose all of these things on us, when in reality that’s only partially true. The way it works in practice is that people ask for it.

There is a perceived balance between liberty and security. War and tyranny, and the centralized ledgers that fuel them, come not just out of human evil, but also from human fear. When people are afraid of invaders, plagues, technology, and competition over scarce resources, they turn to their leaders for protection. They give up some of their liberty as long as they perceive that they’re under the collective security umbrella, and that the power of the state will be directed at others rather than themselves. This can work for a time, but it breeds corruption. Power begets power, and eventually turns inward. State failures, when they inevitably occur, must be covered up. Critics of the state, whether from without or from within, must be silenced. When liberty is gone, that system which promised security eventually and ironically becomes the biggest threat to it.

People who criticize ubiquitous surveillance and bureaucratic overreach when wielded by their political opponents often turn around to embrace those tools as soon as their political allies are in power. It’s a short-sighted strategy, relying either on staying in power forever, or in the lack of foresight about how those tools will be given back to their opponents at some point, stronger than ever and ready to be used against them yet again.

If Bitcoin fails to catch on by 2036, I think it will be because humanity didn’t want it, or wasn’t ready for it. The technology itself is robust. Proof of work helps keep the network secure. Tight limits on bandwidth and storage help keep the network decentralized. Layers built on top of it help provide scaling and privacy. There is more work to do, but the foundation is already strong, open for business, and being used at scale. To the extent that major challenges arise, the network is upgradable whenever sufficient consensus is achieved.

In this latest bull/bear cycle, Bitcoin further separated itself from other cryptocurrencies, but failed to attract many new users. AI services caught on with the public far more quickly, leapfrogging Bitcoin in adoption, because people and businesses could see AI’s immediate benefits to them, while Bitcoin’s benefits were unclear to many who haven’t gone down a rabbit hole of research.

There are many stores of value to choose from, and volatility is painful. In order for Bitcoin to truly catch on, it will need to be because people value financial sovereignty. It will need to be because hundreds of millions of people, not just several million as we have now, appreciate the importance of self-custodied savings, permissionless payments, and financial privacy. Those collectively are the attributes that Bitcoin uniquely provides at scale.

Prior to Bitcoin, during this century of fast transactions but without fast settlements, governments could impose their control over the financial system in the background. By regulating the banks, they could surveil and contain activities to a significant degree without restricting almost any end-user directly. Thus, most people didn’t see any direct threats to their financial liberty. After Bitcoin, people can run open-source code, can transact without permission, and can hold liquid savings in their own custody. To the extent that governments are threatened by this, they can’t just impose restrictions on thousands of banks anymore; they have to impose restrictions on millions of end-users and developers.

The question is, now that technology has pulled the mask off, will enough people resist and push forward through frictions, or will they comply without protest and move backward?

We have the tools now, but will we use them? That’s the main question to answer for 2036.

Don’t miss your chance to own The 2036 Issue — featuring articles written by many influential figures in the space pondering the challenges of the next decade!

This piece is featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The 2036 Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

This post The 2036 Issue: What Choices Will You Make On The Way To A Multipolar World? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Lyn Alden.

As I write this, Bitcoin is coming off of conceivably its worst week ever.

It started out with the January 31, 2026 release of batch number two of the Epstein files, which implicated none-too-few Bitcoiners and early stage Bitcoin companies (I wonder, will we still be talking about Epstein in 2036?).

The release now reads like a nasty omen. Because on Thursday of the same week, bitcoin suffered its fourth worst drawdown ever, a 21% bludgeoning that bled $16,000 from its price as it went from $76,000 to $60,000 in a single day. 

This was gnarly for bitcoin holders, of course, but it was gnarlier still for Bitcoin miners, who were already suffering under historically low revenue compression.

Bitcoin hashprice – a measure of mining revenue in either USD or BTC per unit of hashrate – hit an all-time low of $28.90/PH/day, according to Bitcoin mining data platform Hashrate Index. This means that 1 petahash of hashrate (roughly five new generation ASIC miners) would net you a paltry 28 dollars and 90 cents.

A bum can make a better daily wage panhandling.

It’s no surprise, then, that Bitcoin’s difficulty experienced 6 negative difficulty adjustments (out of 7 total) in three months between November 12, 2025 and February 7, 2026 (and the only positive adjustment was 0.04% on Christmas Eve). The last time we had a string of adjustments like that? 2011.

2011, y’all – when early tinkerers were mining with the computing power equivalent of a toaster compared to modern ASIC miners.

Now, bitcoin’s anemic price isn’t the only factor weighing on difficulty. Bitcoin miners are also pivoting to AI, and they are starting to decommission their ASIC fleets to make room for The Next Big Thing.

But the economic stress miners are facing right now offers a decent glimpse into the future of an industry whose underlying commodity trades in backwardation on a long enough timeframe. Put another way, hashprice is trending to zero, so what does that mean for Bitcoin?

Nothing good. But also, nothing bad, either.

For sale, blockspace. Used once.

Before we prognosticate, let’s examine where the Bitcoin mining industry is now.

I said earlier that hashprice is trending to zero. This is due to a combination of Moore’s law – as semiconductors improve, so too does the energy efficiency of ASIC miners, meaning miners can produce more hashrate with fewer electrons, which puts pressure on Bitcoin’s difficulty and reduces the rate of mining rewards per unit of hashrate – and the Halving.

The block subsidy will eventually hit zero. By 2036, it will be 0.78125, so for the block subsidy to offer the same nominal payout under today’s 3.125 BTC subsidy given current BTC prices (roughly $212,000), bitcoin will need to be $272,000. 

Failing that, Bitcoin miners better pray for fat transaction fees. But even here, the trend is working against them. Right now, you can get a transaction confirmed for under 1 satoshi per virtual byte (sat/vbyte). 

Bitcoin adoption is at an all-time high but the mempool is a ghosttown. Part of this is thanks to data-efficient upgrades like SegWit and Taproot, but it’s also because Bitcoin is scaling as Hal Finney predicted: via Bitcoin banks, be those exchanges, other custodians, or paper products like the ETFs.

The only truly meaningful on-chain use of the last three years has come from what some Bitcoiners call shitcoins: ordinals and inscriptions, which ironically were largely adopted by “shitcoiners” from the realms of Ethereum and Solana.

Please set aside any moralizing, kvetching, and pearl clutching for a moment. It doesn’t matter if you love or hate monkey JPEGs on Bitcoin, but you need to acknowledge that they were a boon for miners and they buoyed block rewards before and after the 2024 Halving.

This market is dead now, though, and so far no Layer 2 or alternative use case for the blockspace has filled the vacuum they left. Given the lack of adoption for the swathes of Layer 2 projects that were paraded out during the ordinals mania to great fanfare, I think it would be wise to not count on such platforms generating meaningful fees in 10 years. Hopefully they will! But I wouldn’t bet on it. 

Maybe in the age of AI people will start using Bitcoin timestamps for content and identity attestation – or some other, unforeseen use of blockspace will pop up – but again, I’m not holding my breath. 

It is likely, however, that AI produces at least some positive externalities for Bitcoin miners, even if it also brings with it negative ones.

The coming domin(AI)tion blackpill

The biggest trend in Bitcoin mining over the last year has nothing to do with Bitcoin.

The largest Bitcoin miners in the world – Core Scientific, Riot, IREN, Cipher, CleanSpark, Hut 8, TeraWulf, among others – have started swapping ASICs for GPUs to cash in on the LLM gravytrain.

It’s almost a retrograde movement, except the GPUs aren’t producing nonces for miners as they once did  – they’re running AI or high-performance computing loads. 

I’m not sure how many Bitcoiners have played this tape through, or pondered the implications of it. Publicly traded Bitcoin miners – the ones making these pivots, or at least the ones making the most noise about them – account for roughly 40% of Bitcoin’s hashrate. And they’re trying to find a way to convert every basis point of this total into computing fodder for Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. 

If you’re wondering why, it’s simple dollars and cents. They can monetize their megawatts for much greater sums than mining bitcoin. Sorry if that shatters any illusions you may have about the fabled altruistic miner who is hashing to defend the network against those dastardly bad actors. 

This is a good thing actually. Firstly, it’s a headwind for hashrate growth, which is a tailwind for mining profitability. Fewer mega miners means more satoshis to go around for everyone else, but perhaps more importantly, it takes a cohort of Bitcoin miners out of the game who have lopsided operational and financing advantages.

Specifically, I’m talking about public miners’ access to capital markets, which allows them to aggressively scale their hashrate even if they are not profitable. Not making enough from mining to cover your costs? No problem – just dilute your shareholders! For years, public Bitcoin miners have issued new equity, sold it into the open market, and used the proceeds to shore up operation costs and expand their operations more quickly than private miners. 

The end result is that Bitcoin’s hashrate has grown much more quickly than we might otherwise expect. When China dominated mining, Bitmain fueled meteoric hashrate growth with its self-mining and via the proxies in its spoils system. Since the China Mining Ban in 2021 shifted hashrate to the U.S., the rapid proliferation of public miners has had the same effect.

But the promise of an AI payday will be too tempting for these companies to ignore, so this new computing application will take these public miners out of the game. And this shift will be as dramatic as The Great Hashrate Migration after China’s 2021 Bitcoin mining ban.

The megaminer disintermediation whitepill 

This coming change isn’t a blackpill, though. It’s a whitepill.

As mega-miners fade into the background, the smaller and medium-sized miners, those who operate on the margins, on the outskirts, and who have little chance of converting their operations into another form of data center, will thrive – or at least survive. 

Ten years from now, the majority of hashrate should come from these Bitcoin miners, not the publicly traded companies who could mine without regard for actual profitability. Those miners who are around in 2036 will be scrappy, shrewd, and nimble. They will have some edge that makes their operations economical, be that recycling heat; mining off-grid on oil and gas wells, wind farms, or solar arrays; or be integrated on the power-plant level.

For the few large scale miners that will still exist at this time, they will likely be among the last bunch in that list: Bitcoin mining operations that run on energy-producing assets, from nuclear sites to natural gas plants, to soak up excess electricity whenever there is a bumper crop of production. 

Perhaps it goes without saying, but of course, this assumes that block rewards are healthy enough to sustain hashrate even on the margins. To return to our math in the second section, bitcoin will need to be at least $272,000 to match the value of the current block subsidy. 

Ideally, transaction fees make up more than ~1% of the block subsidy, which has been the theme for more than a year, but there’s no guarantee that this will be the case. (Even if they don’t, though, miners with the lowest cost energy will still be mining assuming bitcoin isn’t totally worthless.)

Energy efficiency gains from ASICs will help pick up the slack for overall profitability, but only so much, as the watt-per-terahash ratio is improving at a slower and slower rate and will virtually plateau at some point in the future given the current trajectory. 

The last five years have been the exception, not the rule

But again, all of this is a good thing, actually, because it will disintermediate the largest actors in the Bitcoin mining industry, which consequently serve as potential chokepoints that could compromise the network.

The public miners are an obvious centralization point here. These are highly scrutinized, legally compliant firms that will bend the knee to Uncle Sam if it threatens their business. (Lest we forget, MARA (formerly, Marathon Digital Holdings) started mining OFAC-compliant blocks – blocks that censored any transaction connected to an OFAC-sanctioned Bitcoin wallet – in 2021, despite the fact that there was no law or legal precedent to mandate such an action).

Less obvious, though, is the threat that Bitcoin mining pools present to Bitcoin’s permissionless and censorship-resistant ethos. The vast majority of mining pools operate using a full-pay-per-share (FPPS) payout method. This means that miners are paid regardless of how many blocks the pool mines, using the hashprice metric we covered in the introduction. This model, the obverse of the pay-per-last-n-share (PPLNS) that Slushpool (now Braiins Pool) pioneered in 2011, means that the pool assumes all of the risk of mining, and they act as insurance companies of sorts for miners by guaranteeing income regardless of how much bitcoin the pool is actually mining. For example, if an FPPS pool mines 10 blocks a day and is responsible for 9 blocks worth of payouts, they pocket the difference, but if they mine 8 blocks, they eat the difference. 

As hashprice becomes increasingly compressed with each successive block subsidy halving, it will become increasingly difficult for FPPS providers to cover the risk of mining luck while guaranteeing payouts. This becomes even more difficult if transaction fees start making up even a modest amount of total mining revenue, because FPPS pools typically calculate hashprice using the base block subsidy plus a rolling average of transaction fees over a given period. Put another way, what happens when an FPPS pool has to pay its miners using a hashprice that assumes transactions make up 10% of mining revenues, but the blocks this pool mines only make half of that?

Pool solvency becomes a mounting concern, and so FPPS pools will have to either adapt, or another model – either old or new – will take its place out of necessity. 

This is another positive still, because it neutralizes another weak point for Bitcoin. Right now, Foundry, a U.S.-based mining pool, mines 1/3rd of Bitcoin blocks. What do you think would happen if the U.S. government tells Foundry to censor certain transactions, and create a white and black list for approved or sanctioned Bitcoin wallets? 

If FPPS fades into the background, we might expect self-mining and PPLNS-esque payouts to dominate, and this should eat into the market share of large FPPS pools and mitigate the above risk. (The counterfactual to this hypothetical, just to be intellectually honest, is that as Bitcoin mining becomes more variable, one or two pools end up dominating marketshare, as only the largest companies have enough sway to attract users and make good on their payout promises). 

Ultimately, Bitcoin mining just isn’t a good business, and that’s actually a good thing. A dwindling block subsidy and hashprice will push mining to the margin, to the lowest cost of energy possible, with operators that can only scale with prudence and diligence. In ten years, Bitcoin mining will likely be much more distributed than it is now as a result.

It’s entirely possible, then, that we look back on the mega-mining meta that became popular in the U.S. after the China Mining Ban as an aberration rather than the norm – another product of a fiat-warped, zero-percent interest rate policy economy that was doomed to expire when the accounting stopped making sense. 

Don’t miss your chance to own The 2036 Issue — featuring articles written by many influential figures in the space pondering the challenges of the next decade!

This piece is featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The 2036 Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

This post The 2036 Issue: Bitcoin Mining Is Dead, Long Live the Miners! first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Colin Harper.

None of us can see the future. We don’t know what 2036 will bring. 

We all like to tell ourselves that we can, or do, and maybe we do actually see small pieces of it coming before we catch up to them, but none of us see the whole picture. That’s, at the end of the day, part of what it is to be human. 

Nevertheless we can’t seem to help ourselves from at least trying. 

Going into the second half of the 2020s we are coming out of a time period that marked wild and tumultuous disruption, with the world changing in both big and small ways that none of us could have imagined in our wildest dreams at the start of 2020. As we enter the second half of the decade, events around the world are starting to push us in a direction that seems like it will be even more disruptive and unpredictable than the first half of the decade. 

In this issue, we are going to do what we can’t help ourselves doing, we’re going to try to predict the shape of the next decade. I say shape, and not just the future itself, because that is the best that human beings can actually do. 

These pages are filled with pieces written by some of the most influential and intelligent people that engage in this space trying to look ahead and provide something of value to you, the reader. Some have given deep analysis of how larger geopolitical trends will unfold, others have written more lighthearted musings on what different aspects of our lives will be like day-to-day, and some have written what I can only call warnings or reminders of what to keep in mind while navigating the coming ten years. 

Every few generations, the world seems to go through some tumultuous upheaval. A radical shift that upends the order and institutions that maintained the previous shape of the world. I think we are entering that next period now, and we’ve probably been standing in its doorway since 2020. 

Chaos and change are not solely reasons to give in to fear, or anxiety, they are also reasons to have hope and optimism. When things fall apart, it doesn’t just mean the end of what was there before, it means there is space to build something new. It signals the beginning of something new in the exact same moment that it signals the end of something old. 

The next ten years are going to be the biggest opportunity yet for Bitcoin. We can either spend them optimistically building, putting our energy into bringing into reality the positive impact we see that Bitcoin can have on the world, or we can squander them doing the opposite. 

Ultimately, the shape the future has when it finally arrives at our doorstep will be the shape that all of our individual actions and choices mold it into. 

Make them count. 

Don’t miss your chance to own The 2036 Issue — featuring articles written by many influential figures in the space pondering the challenges of the next decade!

This piece is the Letter from the Editor featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The 2036 Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

This post The 2036 Issue: Letter From The Editor first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

Don’t miss your chance to own The Core Issue — featuring articles written by many Core Developers explaining the projects they work on themselves!

In the beginning there was only Satoshi Nakamoto and a powerful idea. Nakamoto started working on Bitcoin as far back as 2007^[1], and as far as we know worked on it entirely himself, until a few weeks after his release of the Bitcoin white paper on October 31st 2008^[2], when Nakamoto took on the first Contributor to the project, Hal Finney^[3].

Finney, it turns out, was critical to Bitcoin’s early success. According to recently surfaced emails^[4] Nakamoto’s node was unable to receive “incoming connections” for a couple of days after the minting of the genesis block, resulting in Finney being the only node other users could connect to. Nakamoto told Finney in a private email “Your node receiving incoming connections was the main thing keeping the network going the first day or two.”

Finney was also one of the first known reviewers and contributors to Bitcoin, Nakamoto shared the software with him and a few other cypherpunk legends before it was shown to the world. Finney even contributed code to the project before its first release, as revealed by Ray Dillinger who Nakamoto also shared pre-released versions of the code with.

In an interview conducted by Nathaniel Popper published on Dillinger’s blog, he said^[5]; “It was when we started talking about floating-point types in accounting code that I learned Finney was involved in the effort. Finney was reviewing the transaction scripting language, and both the code he had, and the code I had, interacted with the accounting code.”

The timeline roughly matches the activity page of the oldest Sourceforge web archive we have of the Bitcoin project page, where Nakamoto added Finney to the project on December 18, 2008. This decision by Nakamoto marks the first instance of Maintainer level permissions possibly being held by anyone other than Nakamoto. It is possible and likely that Finney gained developer status within the Sourceforge Bitcoin project, allowing him to download, modify and upload versions to Bitcoin to the site.

So, besides being a Contributor, reviewer, and a node runner, was Hal Finney also a Bitcoin Maintainer?

The strictest definition of a Maintainer is someone who has ‘commit access’ or write access to the primary development branch of a software project. Contributors to a project like Bitcoin may ‘commit’ code to development branches of the project, and submit ‘pull requests’ to have the code integrated to the master branch, but those updates can only be ‘merged’ into the master branch by its Maintainers^[6] through “commit access”..

By that definition, Finney may very well count as the first Maintainer after Nakamoto, but being a Bitcoin core Maintainer is arguably a lot more than just having commit access. Maintainers must also have a good reputation among the developer community and be frequent, producing Contributors.

Bitcoin Maintainers have in some cases been active developers of the project, who were well known enough by other Maintainers and seemed to be a good fit for the role. In other cases, they have been active reviewers and auditors of the code, merging code contributions that appear to have consensus, and refusing to merge code that does not.

The Maintainer role in turn carries a high status within the Bitcoin industry, and it is vulnerable to reputation ending mistakes. In some cases, famous Maintainers have had their access revoked, when considered by other Maintainers to be compromised, as seen in the case of Gavin Andresen^[7] when he endorsed scam artist Craig Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto. In other cases, Maintainers have quit the role, in response to targeted harassment as seen with Gregory Maxwell^[8].

Generally, the Maintainer role in Bitcoin is expected by Contributors to be an engineering role and not a political one. Discussions on Github pull requests for example are expected to be about the technical and implementation details of a particular commit, rather than the person making the commit, their particular politics, allegiances. Discussions that touch consensus and are controversial or hotly debated are generally relegated to the Bitcoin mailing list and other forums, as do topics of a political nature.

It is important to note that whatever power there is embedded in the Maintainer role has arguably diminished over Bitcoin’s history, as the project has grown from the early days of Nakamoto. There are even examples of code getting merged to the master branch, only to be removed again^[9] after further review, making decisions by Maintainers far from final.

Maintainers throughout Bitcoin’s history have at times been accused of being gate keepers, refusing to merge updates to Bitcoin that factions of the community support, often in part because other factions of the community oppose them. In this sense, the Maintainer role does carry a certain kind of ‘taste making’ power, the permission to discern whether a commit has consensus or not, something not easy to quantify.  

This exclusive permission to merge or not to merge may be an unavoidable necessity of open source development, as no project would be considered safe or stable if anyone could merge any code into it at any time. In an adversarial environment, a meritocracy that filters code suggestions based only on the content of the ideas and their merit is arguably the best model we can strive for, anything else is a centralizing political system.

As such, the Maintainer role has persisted across Bitcoin development history, often held by multiple people, expanding and contracting in responsibilities. The role often draws the attention and curiosity of the broader Bitcoin community, as Maintainers as well as Contributors earn, enjoy and suffer the burdens of an emergent kind of leadership, especially in technical matters.

Unfortunately, data about the very early stage of Bitcoin development is scarce, leaving us only with glimpses into what role Finney played before the Genesis block. Maintainer permission history is actually quite opaque across open source development. Hubs like Sourceforge and Github fail to expose commit access history or detailed membership permissions to the public. Records like Nakamoto adding Finney to Sourceforge are actually a rare sight in Bitcoin Maintainer history.

Nevertheless, version control systems like SVN and Git which were implemented weeks after the first release of Bitcoin, do track commits across time and branches for the public to review, giving us public insights into what has happened. As a result, our knowledge of Bitcoin Maintainer history tends to come from first and last commits made to the master repo, announcements on Bitcointalk, or other forums, and confirmation of access revocation by active Maintainers at the time —in rare cases. A significant portion of the research on this article comes from Bitcoin Core Maintainer Ava Chow’s documentation of the relevant history^[10].

The tracking of commit access or Maintainers was improved in 2014 with the addition of the trusted-keys system,^[11] which adds a white list of PGP public keys into the master branch of Bitcoin Core. Keys can only enter and exit the list via commits merged by active Maintainers, and all commits to the master branch should be signed, by the corresponding private keys, a process that anyone in the public can verify and audit, comparing the software signature to the corresponding PGP keys.

The trusted-keys system was added as a security safeguard by Matt Corallo^[12], who told Bitcoin Magazine the feature was the result of a general process of improvements and optimizations, and not a response to any particular catalyst or event.

A Brief History of Bitcoin Core Maintainers: The Satoshi Nakamoto Era

On January 3rd 2009, Nakamoto minted the genesis block^[13], effectively launching the digital currency into public beta. He added a message to the block that anchored and time stamped Bitcoin’s launch to the physical world with a headline from the British daily national newspaper, “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. The headline is forever embedded in Bitcoin’s blockchain, a subtle yet immutable reminder of Bitcoin’s purpose and birthright.

On the night of January 8th 2009^[14] version 0.1.0 of Bitcoin was released to the public, announced on various forums including the cypherpunk mailing list, on it Nakamoto wrote; “Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending. It’s completely decentralized with no server or central authority.”

The installable windows version of Bitcoin in this first release had been compiled by Nakamoto and the source code made available as part of a .rar file published on SourceForge.net. This act made Nakamoto the founder and Lead Maintainer of Bitcoin by default, a role built into the very nature of open source development. Nakamoto would take code commits from other developers during his time building Bitcoin, download them to his local machine, review and merge the code bases, and produce new version releases, a key task and work flow that differentiates Maintainers for Contributors throughout Bitcoin history. This process would continue until Nakamoto’s departure in December of 2010 and would impact versions 0.1.0 to 0.3.19 of Bitcoin.  

Multiple updates followed the first release of Bitcoin and by the end of January 2009, a third developer had officially become a Contributor to the project. Martti Malmi going by the username of “sirius-m” made the “First commit”^[15] to Sourceforge, bringing online the SVN source version control system — a kind of git, popular at the time. Malmi committed to the ‘Trunk’ comparable to a master branch on Github, making Malmi the second official Maintainer in Bitcoin’s open source development history. Malmi would make a variety of contributions throughout 2009 including the first Linux version of Bitcoin, with the 0.2.0 release^[16].

It wasn’t until the August of 2010 that Lazloh Hanyecz — famous for having paid 10,000 bitcoins for a pizza in 2010^[17] — would join as Maintainer^[18], a month after contributing the first iOS version of Bitcoin to the 0.3.0 release.

Part of Nakamoto’s role as Lead Maintainer of Bitcoin was the stewardship of the network. Nakamoto went as far as to personally ask Lazloh — who was one of the first to mine bitcoin with GPUs —  to slow down his production for the sake of the network. “The longer we can delay the GPU arms race, the more mature the OpenCL libraries get, and the more people will have OpenCL compatible video cards,” Nakamoto said to Lazloh in 2009^[19], looking to prolong the CPU mining era of Bitcoin, which was a major incentive to run Bitcoin nodes at a time when the future price of the coins was entirely uncertain.

On July 17th 2010 on version 0.3.2^[20][21] Nakamoto added the check pointing system, a security safeguard that hard coded a certain block height as valid and its corresponding winning hash. Its purpose was to protect the chain from miner attacks that could theoretically reorganize the chain well beyond what the “widely accepted block chain” was, Nakamoto said on the announcement, adding that “there’s no point in leaving open the unwanted non-zero possibility of revision months later.”

The checkpointing system would result in a new responsibility for future bitcoin Maintainers, who would have to hard code a new block height and its corresponding hash on future releases, well into Gavin Andresen’s era of Bitcoin development^[22]. The checkpointing system was eventually phased out, as the proof of work made deep reorgs unfeasible.

The height of Nakamoto’s power as Lead Maintainer and project founder would be demonstrated during the value overflow bug event of October 2010^[23], where three transactions created 184 billion bitcoin that did not and should not exist. The number of coins the transaction attempted to move was so large that the transaction validation code at the time “overflowed when summed”, breaking consensus.  

This is historically Bitcoin’s most famous bug, sometimes called the ‘inflation bug’ and was likely the most dangerous to the project’s survival. Various community members started noticing the transactions hours after they were mined into the network, springing Nakamoto into action, who, with the help of a few Contributors^[24] including Andresen^[25], created a patched version of Bitcoin^[26] changing the relevant validation code.

Nakamoto asked miners to move to the patched version and resync the chain^[27], resulting in a roll back of the network to a state before the invalid transactions were confirmed. This was a hard fork that rolled back 19 hours of Bitcoin blocks, and probably represents the peak of Bitcoin’s centralization under Nakamoto’s leadership, as well as the peak of power that has ever been concentrated in the Lead Maintainer role.

Following the events of the Value Overflow Bug, Nakamoto implemented the Alert System on version 0.3.11^[28]. The feature — which was somewhat controversial — would make nodes at risk of a critical bug, show a warning and would disable essential features. This Alert System used messages that would have to be signed by a key only held by Nakamoto. He justified the feature saying that “getting surprised by some temporary down time when your node would otherwise be at risk is better than getting surprised by a thief draining all your inventory.” Months later Nakamoto disabled the Alert System in his final version release.

Per the SVN records, only Nakamoto ever merged the code of other Contributors and pushed new official release versions of the Bitcoin, at least until Gavin Andresen became Lead Maintainer in December 19th 2010^[29]. Andresen had been contributing code to Nakamoto directly as early as February^[30] that year, as seen in the release of 0.3.1, and would make his first commit to the SVN Trunk on October 11th^[31], a couple of months before Satoshi Nakamoto published his final version on Bitcoin, 0.3.19^[32], disappearing into history.

At the time of writing, over 1200 individual people have contributed code to the Bitcoin Core project.

The Gavin Andresen Era

With Nakamoto no longer contributing to the project, Gavin Andresen was left as one of the only active contributors to the project with commit access. Malmi had slowed down contribution as Andresen’s accelerated, so when Nakamoto left, Andresen was left as the default Lead Maintainer. While Nakamoto never made a public statement, granting the role to Andresen, he did send an email to Mike Hearn — a frequent Contributor at the time — famously saying “I’ve moved on to other things.  It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”^[33]

“With Nakamoto’s Blessing”^[34] Andresen would take the mantle of Lead Maintainer of Bitcoin and would go on to expand the Maintainer team while also initiate the official migration from Sourceforge to Github^[35], a process which would take some time. It wasn’t until July 14th of 2011 that we would see the first commit merged to Bitcoin from a branch on Andresen’s official github account^[36].

Unlike the Nakamoto era of development, this merge was done by the Github platform, putting some trust on Github.com to not do something shady with the code, a process previously done by Nakamoto manually and on his local machine. It’s important to note that the differences between versions of the code are auditable anyway, Github merge or not, since the project is open source. Code merges in this era could and should have been reviewed by developers on both sides of the process, before Github merge and after, though an abundance of caution eventually led to the creation of the trusted-keys system. Nevertheless, this began a new trend in how code was merged into Bitcoin that would last for at least three years.

On September 13th, 2011, the Sourceforge Bitcoin project was officially shut down, favoring Github as the new collaboration platform, leaving the old Bitcoin page there as an archive. Since both Malmi and Lazloh were Contributors on Sourceforge primarily without Github accounts at the time, their commit access effectively ended with the official migration, as well as their slow down in contributions around Nakamoto’s departure.

On April 27 of 2011, version 0.3.21 was released, the first under Andresen’s leadership. It was also the first to include a Readme file a PGP signed^[37] message that detailed the update, contained hashes for the released installables and gave shout outs to Contributors. Among the 16 Contributors named are well known bitcoin core developers like Luke Dashjr, Matt Corallo, Pieter Wuille and Jeff Garzik.

The next couple of years saw a flurry of new Maintainers, perhaps in an attempt to decentralize what ever perceived power and responsibility Gavin held via the Maintainer role, and to fill in the gaps left by Nakamoto, Malmi and Lazloh. Chris Moore^[38] with the username “dooglas” gained commit access for a couple of months from January 21st^[39] until March 31st 2011^[40] and still contributes to the project from time to time^[41].

A few months later on the first of June of 2011, Pieter Wuille gained commit access^[42]. Wuille discovered Bitcoin in November of 2010 and soon started contributing to the project. After gaining commit access, Wuille would become a renowned Bitcoin core developer, generally credited with many small performance optimizations that sum up over time to large improvements in user experience among many other contributions^[43]. Today Wuille holds the third most commits to Bitcoin core, under the “sipa” username according to Github.  

Jeff Garzik would join as Maintainer a few days later on June 6th, 2011^[44]. Garzik started contributing to Bitcoin as early as version 0.3.21 that year and would also become renowned Bitcoin developer, bringing his extensive experience from the Linux open source ecosystem^[45] to the Bitcoin project. Garzik is generally credited with helping improve the stability of the Bitcoin client.

Years later in the summer of 2016 Garzik had his commit access revoked after “several months of inactivity” according to Chow. During these years the Bitcoin block size war had begun to heat up and Garzik was on the side of the big blocks update^[46], leading to lots of debate, and friction with some factions of the Bitcoin community, a likely cause of his drop in development activity. Garzik would go on to lead one of the failed forks of that war a year later, version Segwit2x.

A month later on July 5th of 2011, Mara van der Laan (who identified as Wladamir at the time) was granted commit access, becoming the eighth official Maintainer of Bitcoin Core. Van der Laan started engaging in the Bitcointalk forum as early as November 2010 and started contributing to Bitcoin by May 2011^[47] initially focusing on the GUI of the Bitcoin QT client and bringing deep academic experience in computer graphics^[48].

On September 19, 2011 Nils Schneider going by the username “tcatm” gained commit access after frequent contributions focused on optimising the Bitcoin client for working in the background. During his time as a Maintainer, he made big contributions helping to internationalize the client, adding multiple language related updates^[49], and oversaw the removal of the Crypto++ library, protecting the client from unnecessary dependencies^[50]. Nils worked as a Maintainer for almost a year with his last commit made in May 31st, 2012^[51].

In February 11 of 2012^[52] Gregory Maxwell with the username “gmaxwell” merged his first commit to Bitcoin after various code contributions and a full year of active technical commentary on the Bitcointalk forum^[53], starting off a three year career as a Bitcoin Maintainer. During this time, Maxwell focused largely on the P2P networking layer of the client as well as consensus and validation related work. To date he is held in very high regard by many in the broad Bitcoin community and occasionally contributes to technical discussions and debates. Maxwell gave up commit access in December of 2015^[54] as the Bitcoin block size war was heating up, due to internet harassment and other related concerns, as he took the small block position. 

After a year or so of expanding the Bitcoin core Maintainer team, on September 27th, 2012 Gavin announced the next step in his vision for Bitcoin’s future, the Bitcoin Foundation^[55]. Made in the image of the Linux foundation, which Gavin saw as a great example of a successful large open source project, the foundation attracted a great deal of attention and support as well as criticism. In his announcement post Gavin said; “I want the Bitcoin Foundation to be an open, member-driven organization, and hope that you or your organization will not only become a member but will help the Foundation accomplish its mission”. Over the next few years, the foundation would help pay the salaries of a variety of Bitcoin core Contributors and Maintainers.

The Mara van der Laan Era

In April 2014, Mara van der Laan was chosen by Gavin Andresen as his successor to the Lead Maintainer role, as Andresen had decided to move towards a more academic role he labeled “Chief Scientist”. In a blog post, published by Andresen on the Bitcoin Foundation website^[56] he wrote; “Wladimir van der Laan has been paid to work on Bitcoin Core full-time for several months now – again, thanks to all of you Foundation members for stepping up and helping to fund core development – and has been doing a fantastic job. He has agreed to take over for me as the ‘Bitcoin Core Maintainer.’”

Under the usernames “Laanwj” and “wumpus”, Ven der Laan would oversee 9 years of Bitcoin Core developments, today holding the crown as having made the most commits to the Bitcoin repo^[57] according to Github graphs, with 7,419 commits — most of them merges — to date. Van der Laan gave up the role in February 2023 for “personal reasons” according to Chow.

One of the first and most notable changes to the Maintainer role under Van der Laan was the implementation of the trusted-keys system, which was committed by Matt Corallo^[58] on December 20th of 2014. The system helped solve the opaque nature of the Maintainer role, by adding a file with PGP public key fingerprints to the master bitcoin repository, as well as a series of related tools^[59]. One of the tools makes sure that Maintainer commits are correctly PGP signed, another script can be used to verify commit signatures against the trusted-keys list of PGP keys.

By having these keys inside the master repo, only Maintainers are able to add and remove keys to the list with valid signatures, leaving a record on Git’s version control system, while giving us pull requests for the addition and removal of Maintainers, which Contributors and commit members can comment on.  

According to Corallo, the main role of the trusted-keys system was “to avoid trusting Github” to merge developer code, a practice normalized during Andresen’s era of development. Instead, Maintainers merge the code locally and update the repository.

On November 13, 2015, Jonas Schnelli was granted commit access, with the username “jonasschnelli”. He was granted the role of GUI Maintainer by Van der Laan, who announced it in the bitcoin mailing list^[60]. Schnelli who started contributing in 2013 to Bitcoin would go on to reach the top 10 of Bitcoin Contributors by commits on github, many also likely being merges during his role as Maintainer, which lasted 6 years. Schnelli gave up commit access in October 21st, 2021 for personal reasons, writing a thread on Twitter reflecting on his experience and expressing strong confidence in the bitcoin developer community that proceeded him^[61].

On April 13, 2016, Marco Falke was given commit access under the username “maflcko” ^[62]. Van der Laan announced the decision on the Bitcoin mailing list^[63], saying “Hereby I’m announcing Marco Falke as the new Testing & QA Maintainer for Bitcoin Core.” Falke contributed to core all the way until 2023, when he decided to give up commit access and the Maintainer role, for personal reasons^[64].

Less than a month later, on May 6th 2016, Gavin Andresen had his commit access removed. The decision made by Van der Laan came after Andresen endorsed now known Satoshi Nakamoto impersonator Craig Wright^[65]. Many in the Bitcoin community were already skeptical of Wright’s claims and Andresen’s position at the time was quickly revealed to be based on deception by Wright. Months earlier, Mike Hearn, a Bitcoin Contributor who was seen as close to Andresen, advocated on a podcast that Andresen should revoke commit access from all Maintainers and become a “Benevolent Dictator” of Bitcoin^[66], as is done in many other open source projects. Andresen did not follow Hearn’s advice, but the event demonstrated the levels of tension the Bitcoin community was under, as the block size war raged on, which Wright was also a part of.  

Years later Andresen would express his regrets about the events saying “I now know it was a mistake to trust Craig Wright as much as I did. I regret getting sucked into the “who is (or isn’t) Nakamoto” game, and I refuse to play that game any more.”

It would be a couple of years until the next Bitcoin Contributor would gain commit access. On December 4th of 2018, Samuel Dobson known by the username “MeshCollider” was made wallet Maintainer by Van der Laan^[67]. Dobson had been making contributions to Bitcoin since at least the summer of 2017^[68] and would go on to make over 300 commits throughout his Bitcoin developer career, focusing on the wallet side of the Bitcoin code base. Dobson gave up commit access and the Maintainer role in February of 2023 to focus on his PHD^[69].

A year later on June 7th 2019, Michael Ford would gain commit access, the first in the latest generation Maintainers who works on the role to date. Wielding the username “Fanquake”, Ford might have been the first Contributor to gain commit access by Contributor consensus, having been nominated during a core developer meetup in Amsterdam^[70] [71]. Nomination by Contributor consensus would become a trend after this period, demonstrating Bitcoin development’s trend towards decentralization, with meetings taking place in various locations and environments, and even via IRC.

Ford started contributing to Bitcoin in February of 2012^[72] and would thereafter become one of the most prolific Maintainers in Bitcoin history, locking in second place for the most commits according to Github with 4920 to date, many of them merges and maintenance related updates to the work of other Contributors.

The Contributor Consensus Era

On January 21st, 2021 Van der Laan published a blog^[73] that would break with the tradition started by Nakamoto and Andresen, of having a Lead Maintainer for Bitcoin core development. In it, Van der Laan explained that she would start delegating many of her roles as Lead Maintainer, that Bitcoin was too large of a project now to use the model setup by Nakamoto and Andresen, and effectively that it was time to decentralize Bitcoin core development.

Van der Laan made explicit a series of duties that needed to be done by others and laid a road map for making the software release process of Bitcoin more censorship resistant, such as moving the Bitcoincore.org website to the ownership of an organization rather than be under her control, while encouraging mirrors. The setup of release distribution via torrents and possibly IPFS, skepticism towards Github.com and a call out to start looking for alternative code contribution platforms, and a threshold signing scheme for Maintainers to be able to sign releases via some kind of cryptographic consensus, rather than having one person be the final PGP signer of a release, among other ideas.

The blog post effectively marked the end of Van der Laan’s role as Lead Maintainer, and symbolized a maturation milestone in Bitcoin, which came months after the release of version 0.20.0 and only days after the version 0.21.0 release^[74].

Hannadii Stepanov known by the username “hebasto” gained commit access in March 19th 2021 to be GUI Maintainer^[75] for the Bitcoin client. Stepanov began contributing code to Bitcoin core in August 2018^[76], with over a thousand code contributions before becoming a Maintainer, placing him at 5th place in Github’s commits ranking for the project with 2070 locked in to date. Stepanov remains a Bitcoin Maintainer as of the time of writing.

Ava Chow gained commit access in December 12, 2020^[77] as the wallet Maintainer, after contributing since January 2016^[78]. Wielding the username “achow101” Chow is a well known Contributor whose efforts in the Bitcoin development community go beyond github contributions, including a significant portion of the historical research in this history of core Maintainers. Chow is also know to do Bitcoin core review livestreams on Twitch^[79] which gathers an active audience, helping further technical Bitcoin education. Chow ranks on Github as number 4 with most commits at 2198, and still has commit access as of the time of writing.

Gloria Zhao gained commit access in August 7th 2022 after being nominated by Contributor consensus^[80], for the role of mempool and policy Maintainer^[81]. Zhao started contributing in March of 2020^[82] and had at least 200 commits in Bitcoin core before gaining commit access. Today she ranks at number 9 according to Github with 777 commits in the repo. Zhao is a Maintainer to this day.

Russ Yanofsky gained commit access in June 10th of 2023^[83] after being nominated by Contributor consensus^[84], to the role of interface Maintainer. Russ specializes in modularization and multiprocess work which earned him the role, after contributing to the project since October 2016^[85], with 970 commits for 7th place in Github ranking. Yanofsky is known by the username “ryanofsky” and remains a Maintainer to this day.

Don’t miss your chance to own The Core Issue — featuring articles written by many Core Developers explaining the projects they work on themselves!

This piece is the Letter from the Editor featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The Core Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

[1] https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014863.html 

[2] https://Nakamoto.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/1/ 

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20090106201347/http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/ 

[4] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/11/26/previously-unpublished-emails-of-Nakamoto-nakamoto-present-a-new-puzzle 

[5] https://www.ofnumbers.com/2018/10/01/interview-with-ray-dillinger/ 

[6] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/99674/how-do-devs-decide-who-should-have-commit-access-what-is-the-process/99676#comment112930_99676

[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20230406134017/http://gavinandresen.ninja/Nakamoto 

[8] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3x7mrr/comment/cy29vkx/ 

[9] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/31908 

[10] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1774750.0 

[11] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/contrib/verify-commits/README.md 

[12] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits/master/contrib/verify-commits/trusted-keys 

[13] https://mempool.space/block/0 

[14] https://Nakamoto.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/16/ 

[15] https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/code/1/tree/ 

[16] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=16.msg73#msg73 

[17] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Laszlo_Hanyecz 

[18] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=238.msg2004#msg2004 

[19] https://www.bitcoin.com/Nakamoto-archive/emails/laszlo-hanec/1/ 

[20] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=437.msg3807#msg3807 

[21] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/4110f33cded01bde5f01a6312248fa6fdd14cc76#diff-118fcbaaba162ba17933c7893247df3aR1344 

[22] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/bd7d9140f915d68e0abfdcd7ebdbb681c87d18c7 

[23] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident 

[24] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.0 

[25] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823.msg9524#msg9524 

[26] https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/code/139/log/ 

[27] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823.msg9531#msg9531 

[28] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=898.0 

[29] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2367.0;all 

[30] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=383.msg3198#msg3198 

[31] https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/code/165 

[32] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2228.msg29565#msg29565 

[33] https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/mike-hearn/16/ 

[34] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?before=a4e96cae7d3db3f7bfffd14a7fb6754ffbbc084e+46430 

[35] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2367.msg31651#msg31651 

[36] https://web.archive.org/web/20101218045728/http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/develop/ 

[37] https://web.archive.org/web/20110708091605/http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.3.21/ 

[38] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/86c0af514b59971f7a5c3876898165667cbbeb6b 

[39] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/86c0af514b59971f7a5c3876898165667cbbeb6b 

[40] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hvevo/comment/d2t16mh/ 

[41] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=dooglus 

[42] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/fbfbf94deb4224ce65bdbbc9151ddd44a4128753 

[43] https://businessabc.net/wiki/pieter-wuille 

[44] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/62b427ec5532065744f9836e6a7b1676428c3434 

[45] https://bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/jeff-garzik 

[46] https://medium.com/@jgarzik/bitcoin-is-being-hot-wired-for-settlement-a5beb1df223a#.qgx99rxpr 

[47] https://github.com/laanwj?tab=overview&from=2011-05-01&to=2011-12-31 

[48] https://dl.acm.org/profile/81474651580 

[49] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/560078a7685b33bdc8d1a94631633cb2af841976 

[50] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/6ccff2cbdebca38e4913b679784a4865edfbb12a 

[51] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/50fac686541686191647ddabd87d6dae75c24c52 

[52] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/9f3de58d83f54536076be44fe945f56670ef9b60 

[53] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=11425;sa=showPosts;start=6000 

[54] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3x7mrr/gmaxwell_unullc_no_longer_a_bitcoin_committer_on/cy29vkx/ 

[55] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113400.0

[56] https://web.archive.org/web/20140915022516/https://bitcoinfoundation.org/2014/04/bitcoin-core-Maintainer-wladimir-van-der-laan/ 

[57] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/Contributors 

[58] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits/master/contrib/verify-commits/trusted-keys 

[59] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/contrib/verify-commits/README.md 

[60] https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/20151113073052.GB19878@amethyst.visucore.com/ 

[61] https://x.com/_jonasschnelli_/status/1451268520159875080 

[62] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7921 

[63] https://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-core-dev%40lists.linuxfoundation.org/msg00003.html 

[64] https://x.com/MarcoFalke/status/1627987123788824576 

[65] https://laanwj.github.io/2016/05/06/hostility-scams-and-moving-forward.html 

[66] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JmvkyQyD8w&t=2878s 

[67] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/1ca050254145ebbbbf5910bfee2e82a45e465ca1 

[68] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/41f3e84aaca82540582fd5a93fd632e752c3e6bf 

[69] https://x.com/MarcoFalke/status/1627987123788824576 

[70] https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/bitcoin-core-dev-tech/2019-06-06-Maintainers/ 

[71] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/16162 

[72] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/27adfb2e0c1caeef3970605f519edf9058f119ef 

[73] https://laanwj.github.io/2021/01/21/decentralize.html 

[74] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases?page=3 

[75] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/21615 

[76] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/11b9dbb439a15ed275cba673fdc743c612ea374f 

[77] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/23798 

[78] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/5ed2f16480142f0887cc1a6257ff53e2abc3e5b6 

[79] https://www.twitch.tv/achow101/ 

[80] https://gnusha.org/bitcoin-core-dev/2022-06-30.log 

[81] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/25524 

[82] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/2455aa5d7f54befeade05795ed8f5dd89d01042a 

[83] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/27604 

[84] https://gnusha.org/bitcoin-core-dev/2023-05-04.log 

[85] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/18dacf9bd25154e184b097ee4e8f786d9be25637 

This post The Core Issue: The Role and History of Bitcoin Core Maintainers first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

When most people download Bitcoin Core, their interaction with the build system is over in a few clicks. They grab the executable binary of the software, verify a signature (hopefully!), and start running a Bitcoin node. What they immediately see is running software. What they don’t see is the build system and extensive processes that produced that software. A build system that represents Bitcoin’s principles of decentralization, transparency, and verifiability.

Behind that download lies years of engineering work designed to answer a simple question: “Why should anyone trust this software?” The answer is: you shouldn’t have to. You should be able to verify.

In a time when software supply-chain attacks make global headlines, from compromised npm packages, backdoored libraries, rogue CI servers, Bitcoin Core’s build process stands as a quiet project of discipline. Its methods may seem slow and complicated compared to the frictionless convenience of “push to deploy,” but that’s the point. Security isn’t convenient.

To understand Bitcoin Core’s build system, we should understand: 

• Bitcoin Core’s Build System Philosophy
• Reproducible Builds
• Minimizing Dependencies
• No Auto-Updates
• Continuous Integration
• Ongoing Adaptation

Bitcoin Core’s Build System Philosophy

When it comes to Bitcoin’s decentralization, most people focus on miners, nodes, and developers. But decentralization doesn’t stop at the protocol’s participants. It extends to the way the software itself is built and distributed.

One principle in the Bitcoin ecosystem is “don’t trust, verify.” Running your own node is an act of verification, checking every block and transaction against the consensus rules. But the build system itself gives you another opportunity to verify, at the software level. Bitcoin is money without trusted intermediaries and Bitcoin Core works to be software without trusted builders. The build system takes great lengths to ensure that anyone, anywhere, can independently recreate the exact same binaries that appear on the bitcoincore.org website.

This philosophy traces back to Ken Thompson’s 1984 essay Reflections on Trusting Trust, which warned that even a clean-looking source code can’t be trusted if the compiler that built that software was itself compromised. Bitcoin’s developers took that lesson to heart. In the words of Bitcoin Core contributor Michael Ford (fanquake):

“Reproducible builds are critical, because no user of our software should have to trust that what’s contained inside is what we say it is. This must always be independently verifiable.”

A statement that is both a technical goal and part of the Bitcoin ethos.

In the security world, people talk about “attack surfaces.” Bitcoin Core’s build system treats the build process itself as an attack surface to be minimized and defended.

Reproducible Builds: Verification all the way down

The process of producing a Bitcoin Core release begins with the open-source codebase on GitHub. Every change is public. Every pull request is reviewed. But the journey from human-readable code to runnable binary software involves compilers, third-party libraries, and operating-systems which are themselves potential vectors for tampering, backdoors, or errors.

“Trusted third parties are security holes” – Nick Szabo (2001)

To address these concerns, Bitcoin Core architected a build process pipeline using Guix, a package manager designed to create reproducible, deterministic software environments.

When a new Bitcoin Core release is tagged, multiple independent contributors build the binaries from scratch using Guix. Each builder works in an isolated environment that guarantees identical toolchains, compiler versions, and system libraries. If all builders produce identical-bit outputs they know the build is deterministic.

Contributors then cryptographically sign the resulting binaries and publish those signatures on a separate GitHub repository ‘guix.sigs’ that lists these attestations for each release of Bitcoin Core. Some builders are Bitcoin Core developers, but it is not a requirement as the attestation process is open to anyone from the public. In fact, many non-code-contributors regularly contribute signatures.

This process is known as reproducible builds, and it is the antidote to Thompson’s “trusting trust.” It means anyone can take the open-source code, the same Guix environment, and independently confirm that the official binary matches what they built themselves. While reproducible builds can verify the software is a genuine representation of the software’s source code, the software’s correctness is left to processes around thorough testing and code review.

Most people will never perform a full compilation or check the Guix manifests or compare build hashes. They don’t need to. The existence of that infrastructure, and the people maintaining it, gives every user a foundation of earned confidence. 

The official binaries on bitcoincore.org aren’t just “produced by the Bitcoin Core maintainers”. They’re the intersection of dozens of independent builders’ outputs. What you eventually download is what everyone else built and verified to be authentic.

It’s verification all the way down.

Minimizing Dependencies: Less to Trust

Reproducibility is one side of the equation. The other is minimizing what needs to be reproduced. Bitcoin Core’s code is not the only code executed when running Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin Core also relies on external, third-party code and libraries to speed up development and productivity.

Over the past decade, Bitcoin Core developers have steadily stripped away these unnecessary and sometimes problematic third-party dependencies, like OpenSSL and MiniUPnP. Whether it is an external library or toolkit, these dependencies add complexity or import hidden assumptions. Projects like Boost and Libevent, once staples of Core’s codebase, are gradually being phased out or replaced with simpler, self-contained alternatives.

Why? Because every dependency you inherit is a potential supply-chain risk. It’s more code you didn’t write, don’t audit, and can’t fully control. Reducing dependencies makes the build system leaner, safer, and easier to verify.

Brink recently highlighted this effort in its “Minimizing Dependencies” blog post[1], noting that it’s not just a matter of simplicity, it’s about preserving the project’s security and autonomy. Each removed dependency is one fewer external party the project must trust and one less potential for a backdoor.

The eventual goal is to produce fully static binaries: executables that contain everything they need to run, with no dynamic or runtime dependencies. This self-containment means no reliance on external libraries that could differ from one operating system to another.

In a world where most software grows heavier and more dependent on centralized package ecosystems, Bitcoin Core is moving in the opposite direction: toward minimalism and independence.

No Auto-Updates

In most modern software, users are shielded from decisions of what software version to update to, or decisions to update the software at all. You install an app, and it quietly and automatically updates itself to the latest versions in the background. While this is convenient, it is antithetical to Bitcoin Core’s philosophy.

Bitcoin Core has never included automatic updates, and developers have said it never will. Automatic updates concentrate power. They create a single group that can push (potentially malicious) code to every node on the network. This is exactly the sort of centralized control Bitcoin was built to avoid. By requiring users to manually download, verify, and install new versions, Bitcoin Core reinforces individual responsibility and verifiable consent.

The build system and the lack of auto-updates are two halves of the same principle. Only the node runner decides what to run and can verify that the software that is run is authentic.

Continuous Integration: Move slow and fix things

In Silicon Valley, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) are the hallmarks of agile software development. Ship fast. Iterate faster. Let automation do the rest.

Bitcoin Core takes a different approach. Its CI systems exist not to accelerate deployment but to safeguard integrity. Automated builds test consistency across platforms. Bitcoin Core’s build system is designed to be agnostic to hardware and operating systems as much as possible. The project can build binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows as well as for multiple architectures including x86_64, aarch64 (ARM), and even riscv64. The continuous integration system ensures this compatibility as well as software integrity by performing hundreds of tests for each proposed change.

The result is a culture where “continuous integration” means continuous testing, verification and security, not continuous innovation.

Move slow and fix things.

Ongoing Adaptation: Are we done yet?

The build system isn’t static. Developers continue to refine it by reducing dependencies, improving cross-architecture builds, and exploring a fully static build future with zero runtime dependencies. 

While Bitcoin Core’s build system strives for determinism, the build system itself cannot be static. The world it operates within is constantly shifting. Operating systems, compilers, libraries, and hardware architectures all change. Each new release of macOS or glibc, every deprecation of a compiler flag, or emerging CPU architecture introduces subtle incompatibilities that must be addressed. A build system that stood still would, over time, cease to build at all.

The paradox of reproducible builds is that they require continual evolution to remain reproducible. Developers must constantly pin, patch, and sometimes replace toolchains to preserve determinism against a moving backdrop of change. Maintaining this balance between stability and adaptability is part of Bitcoin’s ongoing resilience.

Don’t miss your chance to own The Core Issue — featuring articles written by many Core Developers explaining the projects they work on themselves!

This piece is the Letter from the Editor featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The Core Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

[1] https://brink.dev/blog/2025/09/19/minimizing-dependencies/ 

This post The Core Issue: Beneath The Binary, Verifying Trust first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mike Schmidt.

Over 50 years after the first inter-networked message, peer-to-peer networks remain rare beasts in the jungle of the Internet. Bitcoin’s ability to provide an open monetary system depends on its peer-to-peer architecture, and across its attack surface it is the networking layer–how peers discover and connect to each other–that is the most vulnerable. There are two main places problems can occur: Bitcoin’s own peering protocol, and the Internet protocols that Bitcoin’s protocol depends on. In this light Core has a dual mandate to prevent Denial of Service (DOS) vectors that can be abused between nodes, and enable nodes to communicate safely in the wider adversarial environment that is the Internet.

P2P

“Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.”

– Satoshi, Nov 7, 2008 [1]

The P2P protocol encompasses how nodes exchange messages about transactions, blocks, and other peers. This exchange of information is required before any transaction or consensus validation can occur, and is therefore a primary concern.

There have been several bugs in this area over the years. In 2017, for example, a malicious SOCKS server vulnerability was patched and disclosed [2]. This “buffer overflow” vulnerability could theoretically lead to many different attacks: crash the node, inject malicious payloads, or modify data on the node. In 2020, a high severity vulnerability was reported and patched where a remote peer could get addresses banned, growing the banlist quadratically, and is therefore a DOS on the node [3]. The vulnerability was not disclosed until 2024. This bug is correctly marked as “high severity” since the attack is simple to execute, its effect results in a loss of function for the node, and it has few preconditions required to make it work. These are the kind of bugs that keep Core developers up at night, and why it is highly encouraged to update your node to a still maintained version (older versions of Core are not actively maintained/updated).

This distributed network we call Bitcoin remains relatively small: the clearnet node count hovers around 20k nodes, and even assuming a generous 100k TOR nodes, we still have a small, easily surveillable network. Recently, Daniela Brozzoni and naiyoma showed [4] that if a node runs with both clearnet and Tor, it is trivial to map a node’s IPv4 and Tor addresses. It is very likely that this is already done by intelligence agencies and chainalysis companies. It then becomes easy to notice which nodes publish which transactions first, deducing the transaction’s original IP, and therefore location. While this is not a bug per se, since the node does not crash or misbehave, it can be considered a vulnerability, since it presents a method for tying a given IP address to a transaction. 

How to prevent this effectively is currently an open question.

The Badlands of the Web

“We build our computers like we build our cities. Over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.” – Ellen Ullman [5]

Bitcoin runs on the Internet, and its ability to remain a distributed and decentralized system depends on the properties of the Internet itself. Unfortunately, the Internet’s architecture as we know it today remains woefully insecure, with known attacks employed routinely. Most of these attacks are conducted undetected until damage has been done, and this is not to mention the surveillance regimes that permeate the Internet today.

The most well known and practical vector of attack to be concerned with is called an eclipse attack, where a victim node’s peers are all malicious, and feed a specific view of the chain or network to the victim node. This class of attack is fundamental in distributed systems, if you control a node’s peers, you control its awareness of the network. Ethan Heilman and collaborators presented one of the first practical eclipse attacks on Bitcoin at USENIX 2015 [6], and in 2018, the Erebus attack paper described a “stealthy” eclipse attack via a malicious Autonomous System (AS) [7]. 

These attacks largely leverage weaknesses in the way the Internet’s networks communicate amongst themselves, such as ASs routing topology or via a protocol called the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). While there are ongoing initiatives to secure the BGP protocol–BGPsec, RPKI–they both have limitations that are well understood, and leave the Internet’s stewards pining for stronger solutions. Until then, the Internet will remain the wild west. 

A recent analysis by cedarctic at Chaincode Labs found that Bitcoin nodes are homed within just 4551 ASs, a fairly small subsection of the constituent networks that make up the Internet. They describe a set of attacks that can lead to eclipse attacks by compromising the upstream AS that nodes operate in [8]. The small distribution of nodes amongst ASs and the specific relationships among these ASs creates a unique attack vector. While there are remediations, it is unclear whether this attack vector was well understood beforehand by bitcoiners or their adversaries.

Any attack that relies on compromising one or several ASs requires resources, coordination, and skills to achieve. Although no successful attack of this type has been reported on a Bitcoin node, such attacks have been successfully mounted against miners [9], wallets [10], swap platforms [11], and bridges [12]. While we’re not going to fix the Internet, we can arm nodes with the tools to operate in this adversarial environment.

Network Armory

Below are some features and functionalities that Bitcoin Core has developed or integrated support for in order to arm users against network level attacks:

TOR (the Onion Router) is the oldest privacy-focused overlay network incorporated in Bitcoin Core. It creates hops between a random network of peers to obfuscate traffic. 

v2transport [13] encrypts connections between peers, hiding the traffic from snoops and censors. The aim is to thwart passive network observers from snooping on the contents of your communications with other nodes.

I2P (the Invisible Internet Project [14]) is an optional feature of Core which enables an additional, private, encrypted layer to one’s connections. It is a Tor-like anonymity network which relies on peers to obfuscate traffic between clients and servers.

ASmap [15] is another optional feature of Core which implements a mitigation for the Erebus attack that the authors already outlined in the paper, and applies to all AS-based attacks. By making Bitcoin’s peering mechanism aware of the AS that peers are coming from to ensure diversity amongst peers, an eclipse becomes exponentially more difficult, as an attacker would have to compromise many ASs, which is highly unlikely and almost impossible without being detected. Bitcoin Core supports taking a map of IP networks to their AS (an AS-map) since Core 20.0, and the Kartograf project enables any user to generate such an ASmap easily.

Given that the Internet is likely to continue being vulnerable to many attacks, one of the things we can do is observe our peers’ behavior to attempt to detect malicious behavior. This is the impetus behind the peer-observer project by 0xb10c [16]. It provides a full eBPF tracepoint-based logging system (a way to observe the tiniest actions in a program running on an operating system) to observe a node’s activity, including peer behavior. It also gives you everything you need to build your own logging systems.

Bitcoin Must Be Robust

Securing the ability to connect to peers and exchange messages is a keystone component of what makes Bitcoin tick.

Bitcoin operates in a multi-dimensional adversarial environment, in which many of the threats are created by limitations of the internet’s architecture itself. If Bitcoin is to survive and thrive, its developers and users must learn to navigate these strange waters.

The price of open networks is eternal vigilance.

Don’t miss your chance to own The Core Issue — featuring articles written by many Core Developers explaining the projects they work on themselves!

This piece is the Letter from the Editor featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The Core Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

[0] https://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/connect.html

[1] https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/4/

[2] https://bitcoincore.org/en/2019/11/08/CVE-2017-18350/

[3] https://bitcoincore.org/en/2024/07/03/disclose-unbounded-banlist/

[4] https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/fingerprinting-nodes-via-addr-requests/1786/

[5] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ellen_Ullman

[6] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity15/sec15-paper-heilman.pdf

[7] https://ihchoi12.github.io/assets/tran2020stealthier.pdf

[8] https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/eclipsing-bitcoin-nodes-with-bgp-interception-attacks/1965

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2014/08/07/bgp_bitcoin_mining_heist/

[10] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/24/17275982/myetherwallet-hack-bgp-dns-hijacking-stolen-ethereum

[11] https://medium.com/s2wblog/post-mortem-of-klayswap-incident-through-bgp-hijacking-en-3ed7e33de600

[12] www.coinbase.com/blog/celer-bridge-incident-analysis

[13] https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/v2-p2p-transport/

[14] https://geti2p.net/en/

[15] https://asmap.org

[16] https://peer.observer

[13] https://github.com/asmap/kartograf

This post The Core Issue: Your Node Vs. The Digital Wilderness first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Julien Urraca, Fabian Jahr, 0xb10c and CedArctic.

Intro

Bitcoin’s “don’t trust, verify” culture requires that the ledger can be rebuilt by anyone from scratch. After processing all historical transactions every user should arrive at the exact same local state of everyone’s funds as the rest of the network.

This reproducibility is at the heart of Bitcoin’s trust-minimized design, but it comes at a significant cost: after almost 17 years, this ever-growing database forces newcomers to do more work than ever before they can join the Bitcoin network.

When bootstrapping a new node it has to download, verify, and persist every block from genesis to the current chain tip – a resource-intensive synchronization process called Initial Block Download (IBD).

While consumer hardware continues to improve, keeping IBD requirements low remains critical for maintaining decentralization by keeping validation accessible to everyone – from lower-powered devices like Raspberry Pis to high-powered servers.

Benchmarking process

Performance optimization begins with understanding how software components, data patterns, hardware, and network conditions interact to create bottlenecks in performance. This requires extensive experimentation, most of which gets discarded. Beyond the usual balancing act between speed, memory usage, and maintainability, Bitcoin Core developers must choose the lowest-risk/highest-return changes. Valid-but-minor optimizations are often rejected as too risky relative to their benefit.

We have a significant suite of micro-benchmarks to ensure existing functionality doesn’t degrade in performance. These are useful for catching regressions, i.e. performance backslides in individual pieces of code, but aren’t necessarily representative of overall IBD performance.

Contributors proposing optimizations provide reproducers and measurements across different environments: operating systems, compilers, storage types (SSD vs HDD), network speeds, dbcache sizes, node configurations (pruned vs archival), and index combinations. We write single-use benchmarks and use compiler explorers for validating which setup would perform better in that specific scenario (e.g. intra-block duplicate transaction checking with Hash Set vs Sorted Set vs Sorted vector).

We’re also regularly benchmarking the IBD process. This can be done by reindexing the chainstate and optionally the block index from local block files, or doing a full IBD either from local peers (to avoid slow peers affecting timings) or from the wider p2p network itself.

IBD benchmarks often show smaller improvements than micro-benchmarks since network bandwidth or other I/O is often the bottleneck; downloading the blockchain alone takes ~16 hours with average global internet speeds.

For maximum reproducibility -reindex-chainstate is often favored, creating memory and CPU profiles before and after the optimization and validating how the change affects other functionality.

Historical and ongoing improvements

Early Bitcoin Core versions were designed for a much smaller blockchain. The original Satoshi prototype laid the foundations, but without constant innovation from Bitcoin Core developers it would not have been able to handle the network’s unprecedented growth.

Originally the block index stored every historic transaction and whether they were spent, but in 2012, “Ultraprune” (PR #1677) created a dedicated database for tracking unspent transaction outputs, forming the UTXO set, which pre-caches the latest state of all spendable coins, providing a unified view for validation. Combined with a database migration from Berkeley DB to LevelDB validation speeds were significantly improved.

However, this database migration caused the BIP50[1] chain fork when a block with many transaction inputs was accepted by upgraded nodes but rejected by older versions as being too complicated. This highlights how Bitcoin Core development differs from typical software engineering: even pure performance optimizations have the potential to result in unintended chain splits.

The following year (PR #2060) enabled multithreaded signature validation. Around the same time, the specialized cryptographic library libsecp256k1 was created, and was integrated into Bitcoin Core in 2014. Over the following decade, through continuous optimizations, it became more than 8x faster than the same functionality in the general-purpose OpenSSL library.

Headers-first sync (PR #4468, 2014) restructured the IBD process to first download the block header chain with the most accumulated work, then fetch blocks from multiple peers simultaneously. Besides accelerating IBD it also eliminated wasted bandwidth on blocks that would be orphaned as they were not in the main chain.

In 2016 PR #9049 removed what appeared to be a redundant duplicate-input check, introducing a consensus bug that could have allowed supply inflation. Fortunately, it was discovered and patched before exploitation. This incident drove major testing resource investments. Today, with differential fuzzing, broad coverage, and stricter review discipline, Bitcoin Core surfaces and resolves issues far more quickly, with no comparable consensus hazards reported since.[2].

In 2017 -assumevalid (PR #9484) separated general block validity checks from the expensive signature verification, making the latter optional for most of IBD, cutting its time roughly in half. Block structure, proof-of-work, and spending rules remain fully verified: -assumevalid skips signature checks entirely for all blocks up to a certain block height.

In 2022 PR #25325 replaced Bitcoin Core’s ordinary memory allocator with a custom pool-based allocator optimized for the coins cache. By designing specifically for Bitcoin’s allocation patterns, it reduced memory waste and improved cache efficiency, delivering ~21% faster IBD while fitting more coins in the same memory footprint.

While code itself doesn’t rot, the system it operates within constantly evolves. Every 10 minutes Bitcoin’s state changes – usage patterns shift, bottlenecks migrate. Maintenance and optimization aren’t optional; without constant adaptation, Bitcoin would accumulate vulnerabilities faster than a static codebase could defend against, and IBD performance would steadily regress despite advances in hardware.

The increasing size of the UTXO set and growth in average block weight exemplify this evolution. Tasks that were once CPU-bound (like signature verification) are now often Input/Output (IO)-bound due to heavier chainstate access (having to check the UTXO set on disk). This shift has driven new priorities: improving memory caching, reducing LevelDB flush frequency, and parallelizing disk reads to keep modern multi-core CPUs busy.

Recent optimizations

The software designs are based on predicted usage patterns, which inevitably diverge from reality as the network evolves. Bitcoin’s deterministic workload allows us to measure actual behavior and course correct later, ensuring performance keeps pace with the network’s growth.

We’re constantly adjusting defaults to better fit real-world usage patterns. A few examples:

• PR #30039 increased LevelDB’s max file size – a single parameter change that delivered ~30% IBD speedup by better matching how the chainstate database (UTXO set) is actually accessed.
• PR #31645 doubled the flush batch size, reducing fragmented disk writes during IBD’s most write-intensive phase and speeding up progress saves when IBD is interrupted.
• PR #32279 adjusted the internal prevector storage size (used mainly for in-memory script storage). The old pre-segwit threshold prioritized older script templates at the expense of newer ones. By adjusting the capacity to cover modern script sizes, heap allocations are avoided, memory fragmentation is reduced, and script execution benefits from better cache locality.

All small, surgical changes with measurable validation impacts.

Beyond parameter tuning, some changes required rethinking existing designs:

• PR #28280 improved how pruned nodes (which discard old blocks to save disk space) handle frequent memory cache flushes. The original design either dumped the entire cache or scanned it to find modified entries. Selectively tracking modified entries enabled over 30% speedup for pruned nodes with maximum dbcache and ~9% improvement with default settings.
• PR #31551 introduced read/write batching for block files, reducing the overhead of many small filesystem operations. The 4x-8x speedup in block file access improved not just IBD but other RPCs as well.
• PR #31144 optimized the existing optional block file obfuscation (used to make sure data isn’t stored in cleartext on disk) by processing 64-bit chunks instead of byte-by-byte operations, delivering another IBD speedup. With obfuscation being essentially free users no longer need to choose between safe storage and performance.

Other minor caching optimizations (such as PR #32487) enabled adding additional safety checks that were deemed too expensive before (PR #32638).

Similarly, we can now flush the cache more frequently to disk (PR #30611), ensuring nodes never lose more than one hour of validation work in case of crashes. The modest overhead was acceptable because earlier optimizations had already made IBD significantly faster.

PR #32043 currently serves as a tracker for IBD-related performance improvements. It groups a dozen ongoing efforts, from disk and cache tuning to concurrency enhancements, and provides a framework for measuring how each change affects real-world performance. This approach encourages contributors to present not only code but also reproducible benchmarks, profiling data, and cross-hardware comparisons.

Future optimization suggestions

PR #31132 parallelizes transaction input fetching during block validation. Currently, each input is fetched from the UTXO set sequentially – cache misses require disk round trips, creating an IO bottleneck. The PR introduces parallel fetching across multiple worker threads, achieving up to ~30% faster -reindex-chainstate (~10 hours on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 450MB dbcache). As a side effect, this narrows the performance gap between small and large -dbcache values, potentially allowing nodes with modest memory to sync nearly as fast as high-memory configurations.

Besides IBD, PR #26966 parallelizes block filter and transaction index construction using configurable worker threads.

Keeping the persisted UTXO set compact is critical for node accessibility. PR #33817 experiments with reducing it slightly by removing an optional LevelDB feature that might not be needed for Bitcoin’s specific use case.

SwiftSync[3] is an experimental approach leveraging our hindsight about historical blocks. Knowing the actual outcome, we can categorize every encountered coin by its final state at the target height: those still unspent (which we store) and those spent by that height (which we can ignore, merely verifying they appear in matching create/spend pairs anywhere). Pre-generated hints encode this classification, allowing nodes to skip UTXO operations for short-lived coins entirely.

Bitcoin Is Open To Anyone

Beyond synthetic benchmarks, a recent experiment[4] ran the SwiftSync prototype on an underclocked Raspberry Pi 5 powered by a battery pack over WiFi, completing -reindex-chainstate of 888,888 blocks in 3h 14m. Measurements with equivalent configurations show a 250% full validation speedup[5] across recent Bitcoin Core versions.

Years of accumulated work translate to genuine impact: fully validating nearly a million blocks can now be done in less than a day on cheap hardware, maintaining accessibility despite continuous blockchain growth.

Self-sovereignty is more accessible than ever.

Don’t miss your chance to own The Core Issue — featuring articles written by many Core Developers explaining the projects they work on themselves!

This piece is the Letter from the Editor featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The Core Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki

[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures 

[3] https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/swiftsync-speeding-up-ibd-with-pre-generated-hints-poc/1562 

[4] https://x.com/L0RINC/status/1972062557835088347

[5] https://x.com/L0RINC/status/1970918510248575358 

All Pull Requests (PR) listed in this article can be looked up by number here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pulls

This post The Core Issue: Outrunning Entropy, Why Bitcoin Can’t Stand Still first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by willcl-ark, l0rinc and hodlinator.