Not just a currency revolution: historical, technological, and financial triple proof of why Bitcoin will not be eliminated

From the history of technology, the value of the protocol layer to the incremental demand of the AI era, Bitcoin is not the first generation of technology, but an irreplaceable global settlement layer, and its mission has just begun. This article is derived from an article written by @zzmjxy and is compiled, compiled and contributed by PANews. (Synopsis: Texas buys $5 million BlackRock Bitcoin ETF, $87,000 bottoms out (what about progress in other states?) (Background added: How to survive the Bitcoin winter?) Investment Strategies, Advice and Bottom Judgment When market sentiment cools, the “Bitcoin is dead” narrative always reignites. The central assumption of this argument is that Bitcoin, as the first generation of blockchain technology, will eventually be replaced by latecomers, just as all pioneer technologies in history have fated. This assumption seems logically infallible—but it's wrong. The Curse of First-Generation Technology and Bitcoin's Exceptions The lessons of the history of technology are brutal. Western Union — The communications giant that controlled 90% of the telegraph business in the United States in 1866. In 1876, Bell wanted to sell the telephone patent to it, but the top refused it. Bell turned around and founded Bell Telephone, which later evolved into AT&T — the world's largest company of the 20th century. And the Western Union that refused the call? With a market capitalization of $2.7 billion today, it ranks 3990th in the world. Intel — Invented the commercial microprocessor in 1971 and dominated PC chips for three decades. The peak of the bubble in 2000 was worth $509 billion. Today, 25 years later, investors who bought at the high have still not returned their capital, with a market value of $160 billion — less than a third of their peak. It is not defeated by “faster CPUs”, but by the generational transformation of architecture, the rise of (ARM, TSMC process leadership ) left behind. Cisco—King of network infrastructure. In 2000, the market value exceeded 500 billion, surpassing Microsoft to become the world's first. After the bubble burst, the stock price fell 88%, and since then its revenue has quadrupled, but the stock price has never returned to its highs. The value of the device layer is sucked away by the protocol layer and the application layer. The pattern seems clear: first-generation technology builds proof-of-concept, second-generation technology reaps market returns. However, 16 years after Bitcoin's birth, the situation is completely different. Today, Bitcoin has a market cap of about $1.8 trillion, which accounts for more than 58% of the entire crypto market. In second place, Ethereum is about 300 billion, less than one-sixth of Bitcoin. All the “Ethereum killers” and “bitcoin substitutes” combined, still less than half of the bitcoin market capitalization. After 16 years, Bitcoin has not only not been replaced by latecomers, but has opened the gap. The difference is that the telegraph, chips, and routers are all tools, and their value lies in functional efficiency, and when the function is replaced, the value is zero. Bitcoin is not a tool, but a protocol layer: a permissionless global consensus system. The value of the protocol layer lies not in the speed of functional iteration, but in the accumulation of network effects, immutability, and Lindy effects. TCP/IP will not be replaced by “faster protocols” because the cost of replacement far outweighs the efficiency gains. Bitcoin's logic is exactly the same. Misread Positioning: From Payment System to Global Settlement The biggest narrative dilemma of Bitcoin is that it is judged as a “payment system” — and then judged to be a failure. Transactions are slow, fees are high, and throughput is low. These criticisms are facts. But they criticize something that Bitcoin never tried to be. Payment and settlement are two different things. You swipe your card at Starbucks and it's done in 2 seconds. But did the money really transfer? Without. Visa simply recorded a promise that the real transfer of funds would wait for an interbank clearance — perhaps the same day, or a few days later. Visa processes tens of thousands of transactions per second, but it deals with promises, not settlements. The settlement solves another problem: really, irreversibly went from A to B? Final settlement between global banks has so far relied on SWIFT and central banks – a system that takes days, requires permission, and requires trust intermediaries. Bitcoin is not a competitor to Visa. It is a competitor to SWIFT: a permissionless global settlement. This is not a theory. According to Riot Platforms research data, the Bitcoin network settled more than $19 trillion in transactions in 2024: more than double what it was in 2023, with a single-day peak of more than $30 billion. The Lightning Network, Ark, RGB, all of these L2 protocols have the Bitcoin main chain as the final settlement anchor. This is exactly what the settlement layer should look like: the bottom does not pursue speed, but irreversible finality. From this point of view, Bitcoin's “disadvantages” are precisely the design: block time of 10 minutes, limited block size, conservative script functionality: these are deliberate choices to ensure that anyone can run a full node, verify all history, and not rely on any centralized entity. Inspiration for TCP/IP In the 1970s, TCP/IP performance metrics were quite “poor”: high latency, low bandwidth, no native encryption. IBM's SNA, DEC's DECnet are more “advanced” in technical specifications. But TCP/IP won. Not because it's faster, but because it's simple enough, open enough, and difficult enough to control. Fifty years later, no one is trying to replace TCP/IP with a “faster protocol.” It's not that there aren't faster options, but the replacement costs are already unaffordable. This is a profound inspiration from the protocol layer: once it becomes the foundation of trust, efficiency is no longer the primary indicator, irreplaceability is. Proof of human collaboration In November 2025, Bitcoin Core completed its first independent security audit in 16 years, and the result was: zero high-severity vulnerabilities, zero medium-severity vulnerabilities. Behind this figure is an even more striking fact: an agreement that supports a market cap of nearly two trillion dollars, has only 41 core developers worldwide, and an annual grant of only $8.4 million. Compare Polkadot – with a market cap of less than 1% of Bitcoin and $87 million in annual development spending. We may be underestimating the human capacity for self-organization. There are no companies, no foundations, no CEOs, a group of developers scattered around the world, maintaining the largest decentralized financial infrastructure in human history with very low resources. This in itself is a validation of a new form of organization. The underlying architecture is also evolving. v3 transactions, Package Relay, Ephemeral Anchors – the goal of these upgrades is the same: to anchor L2 more reliably to the main chain. This is not a feature stack, but a structure-level boost. The protocol's grand strategy: the last pieces of the puzzle before petrification Adam Back – inventor of Hashcash, thought pioneer of Bitcoin's proof-of-work mechanism, CEO of Blockstream – recently laid out the direction of Bitcoin's next decade: L1 to be conservative, minimized, and ultimately “petrified” – not not to upgrade, but only to do the last few most important upgrades. Before that, a few key primitives need to be completed: BitVM, Covenants, Simplicity. These terms don't make sense to most people, but their common goal is clear: make Bitcoin a strong enough “anchor layer” and then push all innovation to L2. The roadmap is: Minimum L1 → Key Primitives → Innovation Moves Up → Final Petrochemical. This is a…