I am writing at 00:07. El Salvador time zone of course. Time is relative, you know.  This means that technically, from my perspective, this is already a New Year’s Eve write-up. We consign another one to the history books.

How did it go? 

This has been an amazing year for me. Started off terrible and ended with a bang. And that’s great, it would have been much worse the other way around. But net of that, which maybe few people care about, how was it for Bitcoin?

Because you see, we’re always complaining. We’re expecting the explosion at any moment. As if what we are doing is easy. As if these are not the beginning stages of a battle that will last for several decades.

We’re always so tied to price… to those little numbers, red or green. As if they’re the only thing that matters. As if they were really an expression of the intrinsic value of a revolution.

The truth is, it’s been an incredible year for Bitcoin. Unprecedented. And who gives a fuck about the missed 100k.

Bitcoin has withstood a momentous attack on its network infrastructure. Through the Chinese government’s ban on mining. And it didn’t blink an eye. We witnessed a spontaneous readjustment of the infrastructure without it losing a beat. A test of resilience worthy of a biological organism, which would have been difficult to perform for a large private company. 

Bitcoin has earned a technology upgrade, with Taproot opening up a range of new opportunities for the protocol. Better privacy and new features. Our community has been granitic in its consensus. It’s a sign of great focus and maturity. Taproot may not seem like much to the less attentive today, but in two years we’ll remember it. 

Thanks to the maturation of software wallets and experiments like the one in El Salvador, this has been the year of the Lightning Network. There was finally the development vitality on Layer 2 that many of us had long expected. And it was a joy. Today, thanks to Lightning, you can buy 10-cent Goleadors with Bitcoin, other than the mantra of “you’ll never be able to pay us for coffee.” And you can do it with ridiculous commissions and a fantastic user experience. Unthinkable just a few years ago. The network is also growing very quickly, improving its distribution, and this suggests scalability beyond all expectations.

The media attacks haven’t even fazed us. On the contrary, the great chimera, the spectre of energy consumption that many feared, seems to have faded. Thanks to a more precise scientific debate and a new conception of energy use in the long term. More prospective and less dogmatic.

Most importantly, Bitcoin has not failed to get people talking. It’s a technological temptation that whispers to the world. You can’t get rid of it. Ban it here and it becomes legal tender there. You condemn it up there and they make ETFs and bonds out of it down there. Like trying to plug holes in the colander.

It is inevitable. It is a mastodon that gains momentum the more time that passes. 

It’s been a great year for Bitcoin. Maybe the best ever. Yet I feel so much disappointment. Because there is little to go on. Without the round number at the end of the year, the rest doesn’t matter. We are human after all and we like simple things. Basic. The erotic symmetry of the double zero.

Instead, it has been a great year for Bitcoin, in every way. Any objective analysis can only agree with that.

So bar straight chickenshit.

We are legion.