🧵 Bitcoin Upgrade History — and why it evolves so slowly

1️⃣ 2009: Bitcoin goes live

The genesis block is mined by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Core ideas:

•Decentralization

•Proof of Work

•Immutable ledger

👉 The goal was never speed — it was independence from trust.

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2️⃣ 2010–2014: Survival mode

•Critical bugs fixed (one nearly caused infinite BTC issuance)

•No roadmap, no VC funding, no marketing

👉 At this stage: staying alive = success

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3️⃣ 2015–2017: The scaling wars

•1MB blocks → congestion → high fees

•Community split:

•Bigger blocks

•Or preserve decentralization

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4️⃣ 2017: SegWit

•Activated via soft fork

•Fixed transaction malleability

•Effective block size increase

•Enabled Layer-2 systems

👉 Bitcoin chose slow + conservative

Those who disagreed forked → BCH

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5️⃣ 2018–2020: Lightning Network

•Layer 1 = settlement

•Layer 2 = payments

•Fast, cheap, off-chain

👉 Strategy shift:

Don’t scale L1 like an app

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6️⃣ 2021: Taproot

•Schnorr signatures

•MAST

•Better privacy & scripting

👉 Single-sig, multi-sig, smart conditions

all look the same on-chain

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7️⃣ 2023: Ordinals / Inscriptions

•Images, data, tokens written into sats

•Fees rise, miners earn more

•Highly controversial

👉 Key truth:

If the protocol allows it, it’s not a bug

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8️⃣ Bitcoin’s upgrade philosophy

•Extremely slow

•Extremely conservative

•Mostly soft forks

•No DeFi, no high TPS race

👉 Bitcoin is not an app

👉 It’s a global value settlement consensus

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9️⃣ One-line takeaway

Ethereum evolves like an operating system

Bitcoin evolves like a mathematical theorem

Once proven, you don’t change it often.