Happy birthday (technically yesterday) to the most convoluted thing since Jesus. Ten years ago, an intrepid young Mr. Satoshi Nakamoto authored the original bitcoin whitepaper, which she/he/they/it unceremoniously titled: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. For a small contingent of frothing evangelists (ourselves included), life hasn’t been the same since.
Now, bitcoin’s friends and foes are emerging from their dank caves to pass on their birthday greetings, each seeking to one up the other for Twitter likes, as is the crypto way. So, here it is, your Debrief Birthday Special: the juiciest birthday greetings, ranked in drama from 0-10.
BitGo’s Cake.
Happy Birthday #Bitcoin, @BitGo loves you. pic.twitter.com/h9rMlvH6uJ
— Gabriel Frank (@stanleycrup) October 31, 2018
Goldman Sachs-funded crypto custody service BitGo expressed its Satoshi-love through a twin set of drab-looking cheesecakes that look like they were designed on an Excel spreadsheet.
Drama level: 1.
Birthday truck.
10 Years Ago, #Bitcoin was born.
— 🤘 Nye The Crypto Guy🤘 (@CryptoShillNye) October 31, 2018
Thank you Satoshi. 🙏$BTC pic.twitter.com/jNR5EromH1
Pity the truck driver who has to endlessly explain the bitcoin whitepaper to passersby. “Well, it advocates a peer-to-peer proof-of-work protocol that resolves the double-spend prob—” CRASH.
Drama level: 4.
Angry best wishes from Reddit.
Redditor U/iassss took Bitcoin’s big day as an opportunity to trash bitcoin’s new friends. Inappropriate, but undeniably dramatic:
“In about 10 years, we forgot the lessons. Do Bitcoin really needs [sic ] Goldman, ETF, SEC? Wasn’t it supposed to be the alternative money of the people, not the banks?” [With a link to a 2010 Guardian article entitled: “Now we know the truth. The financial meltdown wasn't a mistake – it was a con.”]
(There’s an interesting point in there, though. You can’t celebrate Bitcoin’s birthday without inadvertently also celebrating the 2008 financial crash.)
Drama level: 6.
Erik Voorhees’s raging invective
An incredible anniversary for one of the most important human creations in history. Today marks 10 years since Satoshi’s white paper. Within another 10, fiat will have begun its terminal decent. Cheers to you, Mr. Nakamoto, and thank you. https://t.co/SvIQtNqjl5
— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) October 31, 2018
Despite utterly undermining his credibility by misspelling “terminal descent,” Voorhees’s birthday greeting hits pretty hard. (Voorhees’s drama rating gets a boost from his CoinDesk birthday thinkpiece that brands fiat currency “the most odious fraud ever perpetrated upon mankind.”)
Drama Level: 7
Jameson Lopp’s contrarian birthday take
Bitcoin is so complex and controversial that we can't even decide which day is its birthday 😁
— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) October 31, 2018
Which day do you consider it to be?
Lopp, after raising the spectre of doubt over the when of Bitcoin’s birthday, offers his own take: “I consider the creation of the genesis block to be the actual birth of the historical ledger that we all use today.”
Drama Level: 7
Jailhouse overtures from Ross Ulbricht
Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht writes from jail, comparing bitcoin to an unruly ten-year-old child with the “the rocky road of adolescence still ahead.” That’s a real gesture. We’re looking at you, cake.
Drama Level: 10.
The closest thing to a birthday message Dr. Craig Wright could muster
I would rather see Bitcoin fail than be slowly bastardised (which is a slow death)
— Dr Craig S Wright (@ProfFaustus) November 1, 2018
It’s not an explicit birthday message, sure, but it's about as festive as we’ll get from Dr. Wright, the eternally scorned chair of blockchain research firm nChain.
(To be fair, if Dr. Wright actually is Satoshi himself, as he has claimed, it would look suspect for him to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of his own whitepaper.)
Drama level: 12
Birthday thread/shameless self-plug
1/ 10 years ago today (Fri 6:10pm 2008-10-31 UTC) Satoshi Nakamoto announced the creation of #Bitcoin to the cryptography mailing list. Satoshi's creation is the most important innovation to money (itself the most important good in any society) in a thousand years.
— Vijay Boyapati (@real_vijay) October 31, 2018
A thread 👇 pic.twitter.com/22R1ZNMYE1
What’s more crypto that penning a ten-billion word Twitter thread reiterating everything everybody already knows about bitcoin just to plug your new Medium article, which includes such dazzlingly original thoughts as, “Never in the history of the world had it been possible to transfer value between distant peoples without relying on a trusted intermediary”?
Well that’s what former Google engineer Vijay Boyapati did. Do check out his blog, though.
Drama level: Dead from exhaustion.
Stark birthday warning
The University of Hawaii Manoa chose Bitcoin’s big week to publish a study on how Bitcoin mining, if left to continue at its current rate, will raise temperatures by two degrees by 2033, devastating the planet. Irreparably.
Foooor, he’s a jolly good fellow. Etc.
Drama level: 99 percent of life on Earth wiped out.
In non-birthday news
- “Serenity” upgrade will see Ethereum process 1,000 transactions a second, announces Vitalik Buterin.
- Ripple to open Middle Eastern office.
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