Antifragility

Antifragility is a property of systems that increase in capability, resilience, or robustness as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. — Wikipedia.org

Bitcoin has been under constant attack ever since its early days. A network that, as of this writing, holds $110 billion in value makes for a big honeypot. As a result bitcoin has developed a certain immune system that continues to improve into the future.

• One of the early fixes to the early bitcoin protocol was to make the script language turing incomplete, which means you cannot write very complex smart contracts on its blockchain. This was removed from the bitcoin protocol because it introduced a broad attack surface. The removal of turing complete scripts from bitcoin hardened it and protected it from many possible attacks. It was decided early in Bitcoins development that it would favor safety and security over flexibility. Many other adjustments have been enacted along the way in response to the constant barrage of attacks.

To say that bitcoin has survived and thrived in this environment is an understatement. Bitcoin has never once suffered a hack to its protocol, not once has an invalid transaction been included into the blockchain, not once has a transaction been reversed after suitably being recorded onto the blockchain. Sure, many have had there bitcoin hacked, but its important to know that all of those cases are of people being sloppy with their private keys. Bitcoin was not hacked, your keys were stolen. If you are sloppy with the combination to your safe, don’t be upset when you find it empty. Not your keys, not your bitcoin.

I expect that bitcoin will continue to adapt and evolve in response to future threats.