Happy 17th birthday Bitcoin, it’s your first year in the Teranode Era

It’s Bitcoin‘s 17th birthday! Can anyone out there actually remember their 17th? Seventeen is kind of an awkward age. It’s a prime number and not really a landmark age otherwise. In many jurisdictions, it’s the birthday between the one where you’re allowed to get a driver’s license and the one where you become an adult. This birthday is still special, though, because it’s the first one of what we now call the “Teranode Era.” We’ll explain that in a bit.

At 2:54 a.m. (UTC) on this day in 2009, and six days after the “Genesis Block,” Satoshi Nakamoto released the first version of the Bitcoin protocol software (Bitcoin v0.1) on Sourceforge. Running it himself, he mined Block #1, the first Bitcoin block mined according to that protocol’s rules, on the same day. He proceeded to mine Blocks #2-14 in the next couple of hours, then there was a 24-hour gap before Block #15. With only one person (or entity) processing blocks in those early stages, blocks didn’t always get solved at neat ~10-minute intervals. The network likely required a few restarts, and there were a few bugs to be squashed before everything started running smoothly.

In any case, the 9th of January 2009 was the date Bitcoin became available to anyone who cared to download the software. It still took a while before anyone did. Those immutable blockchain records of Satoshi’s solo-mining days are (hopefully) the best proof we have that time travel still isn’t possible.

Now let’s get excited about the future

“2025 will see the coming of Teranode,” we said exactly a year ago today. We’re pleased to report that the prediction was correct, although there were a few nail-biting months when people began to ask questions. Like Bitcoin’s first blocks, Teranode also met little fanfare upon its arrival. It’ll still take a while for its significance to sink in and for its potential to be realized. Keep coming back to CoinGeek in case we start publishing “Happy Birthday Teranode!” pieces.

A blockchain network that scales horizontally also flips mining economics on its head. Millions of transactions per second also means millions of fees paid per second. Even if they’re too small for users to actually notice, those micro-fees still add up for miners.

Forget the outdated rules miners, processors, and validators are following on other blockchain networks. On scalable BSV, there’s no need to increase fees at peak times or prioritize transactions for users willing to splurge whole dollars just to get heard. No one needs to artificially pump coin prices just so miners can keep their heads above water… or lose sleep whenever the market dumps.

There’s space for everyone to thrive in the Teranode Era. Users gain access to a blockchain-based digital economy that operates at internet speeds. Developers can build and run any distributed application for any purpose, whether large or small. Miners sit at the center of the network watching everything buzz around them, knowing that buzz is caused by real economic activity rather than empty hype.

With some help from AI hype, entire countries are starting to realize that data centers (and the industries that support them) are the new oil fields. The political environment is becoming more permissive, and there’s a noticeable new focus on ways to generate more electricity. The United States is leading the way, but others will likely follow suit.

Seventeen years ago, it would’ve been difficult to imagine the world economy restructuring itself around blockchain. At least, it would’ve been difficult for everyone, except for that one person who pushed the button releasing Bitcoin into the wild. As billions of transactions start flying past every day, take a second to think of that now long-ago moment in time, where everything quietly changed.

Watch: Teranode is the future of the Bitcoin network