Ripple CTO’s “50-Year Bitcoin” Joke Has a Point: The Real Lesson

Main takeaways:

• Bitcoin evolves on two clocks: slow, consensus-driven changes at the base layer and fast experimentation at the edges.

• Major updates (like Taproot) arrive via cautious soft forks after a long review.

• Rapid shifts such as Lightning payments and Ordinals happen without changing the core rules of Bitcoin, so the titles move faster than the L1.

• The “50 years” line is a cue to see where the change lies, whether in the core protocol or at the edge, before judging whether Bitcoin has really changed.

On November 10, 2025, Ripple’s chief technology officer, David Schwartz, posted a dead line on X: “Bitcoin is not the same now as it was 50 years ago.”

The gag works because Bitcoin (BTC) launched in 2009, so the “50 years” is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but it landed because it pointed to a bigger truth about how to talk about the evolution of Bitcoin.

Schwartz’s quip came in a thread arguing that “1 BTC = 1 BTC” and that volatility exists in fiat terms, not in Bitcoin’s own unit of account. This framing often fuels absolutist assumptions about whether Bitcoin will change at all.

do you know Rajat Soni, a critic of XRP (XRP), is a CFA holder and financial commentator focused on Bitcoin active on X.

The joke exposes the confusion of time

Schwartz’s line works because it highlights a mismatch in how people think about time in crypto.

The headlines make sense as if Bitcoin changed overnight, but the fundamentals lie they were built over decades: :

• Public key cryptography (Diffie-Hellman, 1976)

• Merkle Trees (1979)

• Precursors of proof of work such as Hashcash (1997 and 2002)

• Digital cash sketches like B-money by Wei Dai (1998).

Bitcoin’s 2008 design brought decades of cryptographic work into a single operating system. When a real-world protocol reaches scale, change slows down because coordination costs increase sharply. Researchers and developers now refer to this dynamic as “protocol ossification.”

That slow pace may seem like nothing is changing, but that is not the case. A useful way to think about this is the Lindy effectwhich says that the longer a non-perishable technology has survived, the more likely it is to survive. That’s why long-standing building blocks like public-key cryptography and hash trees continue to underpin newer systems. But the Lindy effect is just a heuristic, not a promise. It describes survival, not inevitability.

So, when you zoom out, the joke is a reminder that The evolution of Bitcoin it runs on two different timelines: the decades-long lineage of its core ingredients and the faster cycles we see in today’s news.

do you know Segregated Witness (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 141) activated on August 24, 2017, fixes the malleability of the transaction and allows the capacity and the best Lightning.

What is changing at the heart of Bitcoin (and how)

At the base layer, Bitcoin is changing, but slowly and only with broad agreement.

Most of the updates are soft forkswhich tighten the rules that the nodes enforce. Soft forks create coordination risk between different versions of the software. To reduce disruption, the community has spent years refining activation methods such as BIP-9 and BIP-8 version bits.

In practice, a change goes from discussion and specification to testing and, if there is clear support, an activation window where miners and economic nodes signal readiness.

Taproot is the clearest recent example. Proposed years ago and activated in November 2021, it added Schnorr signatures and a new type of output that improves efficiency and privacy without breaking existing rules.

The path from idea to activation required extensive review and a miner signaling period before the rules turned on. It shows that updates are coming, but only after the patient’s consent.

Today’s debates, such as the reactivation of “OP_CAT” or the introduction of “OP_CTV” (BIP-119), follow the same model: incremental programmability proposals subject to public research, risk analysis and social review before any activation can also be considered.

The process is as much about coordination between maintainers, reviewers, miners and users as it is about the code.

do you know Bitcoin Script is intentionally not Turing-complete, which limits complexity to keep validation predictable and secure for all nodes.

Where rapid change happens

The pace accelerates once you move away from the Bitcoin base layer.

Payment channels move the transactions offchain, lock them on a mesh and touch layer 1 only as a backstop. This is why the Lightning Network iterates much faster than consensus changes. Its core mechanics, including hashed timelock contracts and newer approaches such as point timelock contracts (PTLC), let value move between untrusted intermediaries.

PTLCs replace hash-based secrets with elliptic curve points, giving channels better privacy, more flexible routing, and the ability to split payments across multiple paths. Because these improvements live in implementations rather than in the basic protocol, they can evolve without a hard consensus vote.

Ordinals and inscriptions shows the same fast-paced dynamics from another angle: new behaviors emerging with existing rules. Casey Rodarmor’s scheme numbers the satoshis and adds data to them through Taproot-era scripting, creating collections without altering the Bitcoin consensus. That is why the phenomenon could explode culturally, while the basic protocol has not changed.

The two examples highlight the split time that the joke indicates: layer 2 and client-side systems can add features, improve UX and even new markets at high speed, while the base layer changes rarely and deliberately. Titles tend to follow the edge, such as Lightning updates or enrollment waves, while the heart of the chain advances in steps correctly on stage.

The deepest lesson

Schwartz’s “50-year Bitcoin” line stands because it condenses how crypto really evolves into a single joke: a slow, conservative core that rarely changes and a fast, inventive edge that does.

The slow heart is by design. Once a monetary protocol has billions at stake, updates only move after lengthy review and broad social consensus, a dynamic widely discussed as protocol ossification.

However slow is not the same as stuck. Concrete paths for change exist, such as the soft-fork track for new opcodes such as “OP_CAT” and “OP_CTV”, which could expand the programmability of Bitcoin transactions. These follow multi-quarter or multi-year timelines rather than news cycles.

Meanwhile, the new behavior can explode at the edges without touching consensus. The ordinals and inscriptions did exactly that by numbering the satoshis and attaching data with the rules already in place.

Forget the years. Think of the remark as a decoder. If a statement about the “change” of Bitcoin does not specify where (base layer or edge) and how (consensus upgrade or emerging use), it misses the point that the joke highlighted.