The Bitcoin mining subsidy halving is a once-every-210,000-blocks event during which attention from all over the world is pointed at the original cryptocurrency.
Further Reading: What Is The Bitcoin Halving?
During the third-ever Halving, Bitcoin Magazine presented the 21-hour BitcoinHalving.com live stream, featuring the space’s thought leaders and biggest personalities sharing their outlooks for this new era. This meant offering a stage where they could conduct high-level presentations for thousands of viewers.
Bitcoin, the Mycelium of Money Presentation
Brandon Quittem of Swan Bitcoin took to the live stream to present “The Mycelium of Money,” his explanation of the unprecedented power of Bitcoin that compares the technology to living fungi.
“Some of Bitcoin’s best characteristics are simply reflections of successful evolutionary strategies found in nature, specifically in the fungi kingdom,” Quittem said. ”How is it possible that some anonymous founder can simply release software to the public and the software goes on to replicate itself and be used by tons of people in only just 10 or 11 years that it’s been around? And not to mention it has a reasonable chance to replace the financial operating system that humanity uses to coordinate themselves. And the answer is: because Bitcoin’s alive, or at least it appears to be.”
Many analogies have been used to describe the power of Bitcoin’s technology as well as its revolutionary potential, which can be difficult to grasp. Throughout the presentation, Quittem drew parallels between Bitcoin and fungi, describing how the former’s attributes can be understood through the lens of the latter.
“Let’s talk about the life cycle of a mushroom,” Quittem said at one point in the talk. “So, most of the mushroom’s life or the fungi’s life is spent underground. It’s in the mycelium form… And when the conditions hit that perfect moment, they explode into life and a mushroom’s produced… Interestingly, this maps perfectly with how Bitcoin’s hype cycles have gone over time. In Bitcoin land, most of its time is spent underground in its mycelial form. People aren’t really paying attention, the price action’s boring… and then, all of a sudden, the conditions are perfect … and all of the world starts paying attention to Bitcoin.”
A Bitcoin Presentation Explaining Miniscript
Andrew Poelstra, the director of research for Blockstream, took to the livestream to demonstrate Miniscript, a “stripped down” version of the Script programming language that he has worked on to make Bitcoin programming easier.
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“Miniscript is, in a theoretical sense, more limiting than Script,” Poelstra told Bitcoin Magazine in August 2019. “But it can do everything that people actually use Script for.”
During his presentation, Poelstra described some of the problems that developers run into with Script to illustrate the benefits of Miniscript.
“The problem with Script then is that you wind up with massive scripts where different people have inserted different kinds of code,” he explained in one example. “How are you going to reason about that?… With Miniscript, we saw we had that tree-like structure. Problem solved. You don’t need to think about interoperability.”
To watch the rest of Bitcoin Magazine’s Halving live stream, visit our YouTube page.
Peter Chawaga
Peter Chawaga is a senior editor at Bitcoin Magazine. He HODLs BTC.
I’m a highly experienced and successful crypto author with over 10 years of experience in the field. I have written for some of the most popular crypto publications, including Bitcoin Magazine, CoinDesk, and Crypto Insider. I have also been featured in major mainstream media outlets such as Forbes, Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider.
