Key takeaways:

• Bitcoin evolves on two clocks: ponderous, consensus-based changes at the base layer and brisk experiments at the edges.

• Major improvements (like Taproot) come via careful cushioned forks after a long overhaul.

• Rapid changes such as flash and order payments occur without changing the underlying principles of Bitcoin, which is why headlines move faster than L1.

• The “50 years” line is a cue to look at where the change is happening, whether in the core protocol or at the edge, before assessing whether Bitcoin has truly changed.

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

The gag works because Bitcoin (BTC) launched in 2009, so “50 years” is obviously a joke, but it landed because it pointed to a larger truth about how people talk about Bitcoin’s evolution.

Schwartz’s joke came in a thread where he argued that “1 BTC = 1 BTC” and that volatility exists in fiat terms, not in Bitcoin’s own unit of account. This phrase often fuels absolutist views about whether Bitcoin will change at all.

Did you know? Rajat Soni, XRP critic (XRP), is a CFA charterholder and Bitcoin-focused financial commentator lively on the X platform.

The joke exposes the confusion on the time scale

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

The headlines make it seem like Bitcoin is changing overnight, but the foundations it rests on have been built over decades:

• Public key cryptography (Diffie-Hellman, 1976)

• Merkle Trees (1979)

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

• Digital cash sketches such as Wei Dai’s B-money (1998).

The 2008 Bitcoin project combined decades of cryptographic work into a single, operational system. Once a protocol of real value reaches scale, change slows as coordination costs skyrocket. Scientists and developers call this vigorous “protocol ossification.”

This ponderous pace may seem like nothing is changing, but it isn’t. A helpful way to think about this is the Lindy effect, which states that the longer an indestructible technology lasts, the longer it is likely to survive. Therefore, long-standing building blocks such as public key cryptography and hash trees continue to support 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 Bitcoin’s evolution is occurring at two different rates: the decades-long lineage of its core components and the faster cycles we see in the news today.

Did you know? Segregated Witness (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 141) activated on August 24, 2017, improving transaction malleability and enabling performance and Lightning improvements.

What changes to Bitcoin’s core (and how)

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

Most of the improvements are cushioned forks that tighten the rules that nodes enforce. Pliable forks pose the risk of coordination between different versions of software. To reduce interference, the community has spent years refining activation methods such as the BIP-9 and BIP-8 version bits.

In practice, the change moves from discussion and specification to testing and, if there is clear support, an activation window in which miners and economic nodes signal readiness.

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

The journey from idea to activation required extensive review and a miner signaling period before the rules were actually enabled. It shows that improvements do occur, but only after patients reach a consensus.

Today’s debates, such as the re-release of “OP_CAT” or the introduction of “OP_CTV” (BIP-119), follow the same pattern: incremental programmability proposals are subjected to public scrutiny, risk analysis, and public review before any activation can even be considered.

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

Did you know? The Bitcoin script is intentionally not Turing-complete, which limits complexity to make validation predictable and secure for all nodes.

Where rapid changes occur

The pace picks up once you move away from Bitcoin’s underlying layer.

Payment channels take transactions off-chain, route them through the mesh, and only touch Layer 1 as security. This is why the Lightning Network iterates much faster than consensus changes. Its core mechanics, including mixed time-locked contracts and newer approaches such as point-based time-locked contracts (PTLC), allow value to flow between intermediaries without trust.

PTLCs replace hash-based secrets with elliptic curve points, giving channels better privacy, more malleable routing, and the ability to split payments across multiple paths. Because these improvements are present in implementations and not in the base protocol, they can evolve without difficult consensus voting.

Ordinals and subtitles show the same rapid dynamics from a different perspective: fresh behaviors emerging by exploiting existing rules. Casey Rodarmor’s scheme numbers satoshi and appends data to them using Taproot-era scripts, creating collectibles without changing the Bitcoin consensus. Therefore, the phenomenon was able to explode culturally while the basic protocol remained unchanged.

Both examples highlight the split pace that the joke points to: Layer 2 and client-side systems can add features, UX improvements, and even fresh markets at high speed, while the base layer changes infrequently and deliberately. Headers usually follow the edge, such as lightning bolt enhancements or caption waves, while the core of the chain progresses in carefully planned steps.

A deeper lesson

Schwartz’s “50-year-old Bitcoin” line remains constant because it compresses how the cryptocurrency really evolves into one joke: a ponderous, conservative core that rarely changes, and a brisk, inventive edge that does.

The ponderous core is by design. When billions are at stake in a monetary protocol, updates are made only after a long review and broad social consensus, a phenomenon commonly discussed as protocol ossification.

However, ponderous is not the same as stuck. There are specific change paths, such as a cushioned fork path for fresh opcodes such as “OP_CAT” and “OP_CTV”, which could expand the programmability of Bitcoin transactions. They are based on multi-quarter or multi-year time frames rather than news cycles.

Meanwhile, fresh behaviors can explode at the edges without breaking the consensus. Ordinal numbers and inscriptions did exactly this, numbering the satoshi and appending data using already existing rules.

Forget about the years. Think of this note as a decoder. If the claim about Bitcoin “changing” doesn’t specify where (base or edge) and how (consensual upgrade or emerging exploit), it misses the point highlighted by the joke.