18 years in, what has Bitcoin truly done?

Maybe crypto really has made it. Eighteen years after Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper, it's unclear whether the oldest decentralized digital asset itself is truly closer to becoming a "purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash" than it was during the financial crisis, but the tools and cultural legacy it spurred have cemented themselves as a part of the current zeitgeist.

You can see this in the financial products being marketed to people, in the novel technologies being incorporated by small startups and massive established institutions alike, the evolving narratives for this financial system that just won't go away, the fact that North Korea's turned hacking crypto exchanges into a major GDP source — you can even see this in video games.

Bitcoin (BTC) itself is now firmly entrenched in the financial system. Sure, you may not be using it to buy a cup of coffee, but retail and institutional investors can put money into the asset through exchange-traded funds. Companies are announcing products to let you borrow against your bitcoin.

The crypto industry it spawned has gone further still. Over the past nine years reporting on this sector, I've seen various trends rise and fall. Cryptokitties took 2018 by storm, yield farming was briefly all the rage, everyone got really into DOGE early on during the pandemic, and non-fungible tokens saw buy-in from Christie's and Time Magazine. The crypto industry was the biggest political donor in the 2024 elections and has already made some of the 2026 midterm elections the most expensive in history. Most of these trends were contained to the crypto industry itself, but remain cultural touchpoints that the broader world — normies, if you will — at least heard of.

The flip side of this is, of course, the fact that the crypto industry keeps getting hacked for ever-increasing figures, and usually by North Korea. The most recent hack, which took place two days ago, saw Binance lose over $6 billion worth of assets, in the biggest crypto hack of all time. Each hack sees more and more funds lost. The irony of the Binance hack is that it was the centralized players — Tether, Circle, so on — who had the biggest role in limiting the losses. The two stablecoin issuers alone froze some $2.4 billion worth of stolen funds, while decentralized autonomous organizations and smaller platforms froze a few hundred million more.

Bitcoin, ether and other decentralized cryptocurrencies met the spirit of Satoshi's proposal; they are decentralized and uncontrollable and those funds may well be unrecoverable.

Blockchain, not bitcoin

The Bitcoin white paper's real legacy may well just be the actual underlying technological infrastructure outlined by Satoshi. For those of you who were around circa 2018, this is a familiar idea. For everyone else who came to crypto later, there was a concept that the blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies was maybe more interesting and useful than the digital assets themselves. Walmart announced it was experimenting with a blockchain to track fresh vegetables and IBM supported the Hyperledger project, to name a few examples.

This past September, the CEO of The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Frank La Salla, told the audience at a Georgetown University event that "there is cryptocurrency, the asset class, and there is blockchain, the technology."

It's a refrain I'm hearing more and more from the various sources I speak to, just in the course of my reporting. Permissioned chains like Canton Network, JP Morgan's Kinexys and Intercontinental Exchange's partnership with OKX are taking off, while other financial institutions develop their own in-house networks for enterprise use cases.

We’ve seen this concept of "blockchain, not bitcoin," before. Goldman Sachs' David Solomon referenced it in 2022 in an op-ed discussing tokenization. CoinDesk reported on a plethora of panels at the World Economic Forum focused on the idea in 2023.

Charley Cooper, currently the president at Ava Labs, was previously the managing director at R3, one of the many projects trying to bring decentralized technology to more established financial firms.

"I was right in 2015," he said last month when asked about traditional financial firms bringing back the idea of blockchain, not bitcoin.

"There is a dissonance between crypto prices in the purest sense and the pace of adoption. If you look at the crypto prices now versus 18 months ago, you would think crypto is in free-fall," he said. "If you look at the pace in which serious institutions are not only evaluating this in an R&D improved concept sense but are moving in a meaningful way going into production live with real-world assets onchain, that is increasing and it's increasing exponentially."

And all of this shows crypto is integrating itself with financial services to the point where the end user may not have any idea they're actually dealing with a blockchain. But Satoshi's legacy is broader than just creating a more efficient financial technology stack for institutions. The sector has ingrained itself into popular culture, with movies and TV shows referencing the crypto sector.

But what really made me think that bitcoin — and crypto, writ large — has truly, irrevocably, undeniably made it is the fact that a decentralized autonomous organization made it into a video game I played earlier this month.

Before I continue: The following paragraph will contain spoilers for the game Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. The game itself (which is amazing and I'd highly recommend) draws from the real world to support its fantastical fictional world. But I still wasn't prepared to see that the chief antagonist was secretly a Decentralized Autonomous Organization that had a governance token. At the end of the game, a splash screen informs the player that the DAO had burned its off-chain data, and the primary users behind the DAO remained anonymous.

You can tell the game is fiction by the way the DAO in question had significant real-world influence while preserving its holders' anonymity. But I digress.

The next 18 years

So where does Bitcoin go from here? If the U.S. actually passes a tax bill in 2027 that makes it easier to spend cryptocurrencies for goods and services, will people pay with their BTC? Or will the deflationary forces inherent to the digital asset mean people will continue to hodl and instead pay with stablecoins or fiat?

Beyond payments, where can Bitcoin go from here? While firms integrate their various blockchain tools and look to artificial intelligence as the next major frontier, the crypto industry has to decide whether to continue trying to fulfill some form of Satoshi's vision or just take the most useful parts while becoming regulated banks themselves.

What will the next 18 years bring Bitcoin?