Bitcoin has been "dead" 363 times, facing the 4 trials of life and death "test"

Original: Luo Zi

Bitcoin has been in existence for more than ten years, and its influence has become increasingly global. It has been declared dead 363 times by the media, and every time the price drops, news of Bitcoin's death will be heard. However, until now, Bitcoin's on- chain transactions are still active , always occupying the throne of cryptocurrency, and it is also the most frequently developed and updated cryptocurrency every month.

It can be said that Bitcoin has been "dead" but has never really disappeared. We can see from the 4 famous Bitcoin crises in history.

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01 Mentougou trading platform stolen

Mentougou ’s English name was Mt.Gox , which was established in 2010. In the early cryptocurrency world, it was a bitcoin trading platform that dominated the entire industry. At its peak, it was responsible for more than 70% of the global bitcoin transaction volume.

On February 28, 2014, the Tokyo Bitcoin Exchange Mt Gox filed for bankruptcy because its holdings of Bitcoin were hacked and lost approximately 850,000 bitcoins, including 750,000 users' bitcoins and about 100,000 companies themselves The total amount of bitcoin held at that time was approximately $ 473 million.

Tokyo bitcoin security company WizSec also issued an investigation report stating that Mt Gox's lost Bitcoin has been stolen from the exchange since 2011. Mentougou chief Mark Karpeles (known as Fat Fat) was also sentenced to 2.5 years in prison and 4 years in probation for the crime of falsifying financial records.

At that time, the Tokyo District Court decided to change the submission deadline of the debt compensation plan to October 28, 2019, which means that the user's loss will not be compensated until this day. However, when the day really came, Mentougou announced that the rehabilitation plan was postponed for 5 months, and a motion was filed with the Tokyo District Court seeking to extend the submission period of the rehabilitation plan to March 31, 2020.

Fortunately, in 2017, Alexander Vinnik, the hacker behind the Mentougou coin theft, was arrested in Greece. It can be said that the French network is restored, and it is not negligent.

The theft of Mentougou can be said to have caused a significant blow to early Bitcoin investors, and many people have stayed away from the cryptocurrency and blockchain industries. But because of this, everyone has begun to attach importance to the security protection of the encrypted assets of the centralized exchange. At present, no matter from the information security technology, or from the third-party custody and other operating models, there has been a lot of progress. At the same time, this has indirectly prompted the entire industry to explore decentralized exchanges where users have their own private keys, so that there is no need to worry about third-party risks at all, which is more in line with the spirit of the blockchain.

02 Dark Web Silk Road founder arrested

Some people say that Bitcoin's value support has always come from transactions on the dark web.Because of the anonymity of Bitcoin, it has become the best payment currency to escape supervision. Tool of. The dark web, as its name suggests, is a website that is in the dark and cannot be easily retrieved, which also provides convenience for anonymous transactions.

One of the most well-known is the Silk Road dark web site, which had nearly 1 million customers at its peak. This also made the founder of the Silk Road, Ross Ublich, earn a lot, and in a short period of two years, he made a huge $ 1.2 billion.

Ublich founded the site, iterating from Silk Road 1.0 to version 3.0. He and the supervisors "fighting with wisdom", the Silk Road website was broken three times, but every time "the bandits", it is when the next generation of Silk Road is reborn.

However, the good times did not last long. In January 2013, the founder of the Silk Road Ublich was finally arrested at his home. In 2015, Ublich was sentenced to life imprisonment. In total, police have seized millions of dollars on the 'Silk Road'.

I personally believe that bitcoin may indeed facilitate some underground transactions in the early days, but this is also a stage of the development of emerging things, which is difficult to perfectly avoid to some extent. When any new thing is not recognized by the mainstream market, You can only look for presence in the margins. Technology is innocent. The only problem is the way it is used. We do not advocate using Bitcoin for illegal crimes.

03 Bitcoin Fork Contest

Dating back to 2013, with more and more Bitcoin transactions, the reprinting speed is getting slower and slower , and transaction fees are getting higher and higher. This is like a highway full of cars, and naturally the speed is faster Nope.

At that time, the Bitcoin community was mainly divided into two factions, one of which was represented by miners such as Wu Jihan, and believed that the block capacity of Bitcoin should be expanded. The other group is represented by Bitcoin core developers. They insist on keeping the Bitcoin network 1MB unchanged. Instead, they launched layer2's Segregated Witness and Lightning Network outside the Bitcoin network to transfer some calculations off-chain.

In the two years of 2016 and 2017, after key people from the global Bitcoin community met in Hong Kong and New York, they failed to reach a consensus. This not only set off a drastic war in the currency circle, but also made Bitcoin prices fluctuate more than ever during this period, and everyone's confidence in Bitcoin was shaken.

(Photo from Hong Kong Consensus Meeting)

At the time, Wu Jihan's Bitmain had more than 60% of the computing power of the Bitcoin network, which directly led to his decision not to argue with others and directly forked out BCH. This version is not compatible with the old BTC. On August 1, 2017, the BCH genesis block was born. The capacity of BCH reached 8M, which can accommodate more than eight times BTC transactions, but it is not compatible with Segregated Witness.

It has now been more than two years since the Bitcoin hard fork, but BTC and BCH seem to have become parallel worlds, and the Bitcoin ecosystem has been deeply affected.

04 Industry Specifications

On September 4, 2017, the “Announcement on Preventing Token Issuance Financing Risks” issued by the seven ministries and commissions of the People ’s Bank of China officially identified 1C0 as essentially an unauthorized public financing. It is clearly stated that 1C0 is suspected of illegal fund-raising, illegal issuance of securities, illegal sale of tokens, and illegal and criminal activities involving financial fraud and pyramid schemes, which have seriously disrupted the economic and financial order.

Once the file came out, the entire crypto market was appalling. On September 15, 2017, the price of bitcoin reached the bottom and fell by more than a third to $ 2980. However, this crisis can be said to have cleared some bad assets for the entire currency circle and the blockchain industry, and also cracked down on speculators who only wanted to get rich overnight, which is necessary for the healthy and long-term development of the entire industry. Essential.

05Does Bitcoin have anti-fragility?

Finally, a concept called anti-fragility is introduced. The concept is simply that it can resist external risks and even profit from them. It's like a person has a very strong heart. Although the living environment is very bad, he has been repeatedly hit, and he has been seriously injured again and again, but after each recovery, he never loses his energy and still has vitality. Stronger than before.

Bitcoin may have very good anti-fragility in some ways. There is a risk of any asset going back, and bitcoin is the same, but people have to admit that the security and vitality of bitcoin is indeed very tenacious, because there are tens of millions of miner nodes in the world to maintain network security and consensus ledger. Even if some miners go offline or even withdraw, it does not affect the operation of the entire Bitcoin network. Many people call it "the first large-scale distributed collaboration in the history of mankind."

Analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch list Bitcoin as the best performing asset in these 10 years. What will happen in the next 10 years?

 

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"Disclaimer : This article is the author's independent opinion, does not represent the vernacular blockchain position, nor does it constitute any investment opinions or suggestions. The copyright of the article and the final interpretation right belong to the vernacular blockchain. A

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