This post was originally written for an opinion series marking ten years since the announcement of Bitcoin. It was not published at the time but appears here, without change, in the form it was written in late-2018. It was originally published in Dec, 2022 and has been backdated.

Reflecting back on my almost-8-years of working on Bitcoin, I’m very proud of his far we’ve come in answering some of the biggest questions around viability of trustless financial technologies. We’ve gone from a niche technology valued by only a small handful of geeks to something discussed and debated in international financial publications. Bitcoin itself has moved on from a single software project maintained by one individual to a large ecosystem of startups, projects, and individuals the world over. Still, we must not allow our progress to make us think that we’re guaranteed success, however that may be defined. Cryptocurrency’s many detractors, more often than not, raise legitimate issues, and the space as a whole has some serious soul-searching to do when it comes to the types of projects we prioritize.