When everyone is shouting "speed up," Bitcoin's design logic appears to be quite unconventional.

Currently, in this circle, everyone is piling up data. Some public chains boast thousands of transactions per second, smart contract ecosystems claim countless applications, and their rapid iteration speeds are dazzling. Against this backdrop, Bitcoin's performance indeed seems a bit "antique"—only 7 transactions per second, no complex smart contracts on the core chain, and often mocked by new project supporters as "outdated."

But a MEME image circulating in the community over the past two years hits the core point: "Other chains boast: I am super fast, can handle everything! (then suddenly crash one afternoon)\nBitcoin says: I am slow, but I have never stopped since 2009."

This is not a joke; it is reality. When Satoshi Nakamoto designed this system, he faced this choice—pursue extreme speed or extreme stability? He ultimately chose the latter.

This PoW consensus mechanism may seem particularly "wasteful" at first glance—its annual computational power consumption and energy costs are astronomical, and criticism is everywhere. But from a security perspective, this "waste" is actually the most efficient fortress. To alter historical data? You would need to re-mine more than the entire network's hash power, which is completely infeasible economically.

The UTXO model is the same. It looks complicated at first—tracking the flow of each "coin"—not as straightforward as other chains that directly maintain account balances. But precisely because of this "trouble," it fundamentally avoids many vulnerabilities common in smart contract chains. Satoshi Nakamoto understood very well the trade-off between cost and benefit.

What has happened in these 18 years? Countless projects claiming to "surpass Bitcoin"—with more aggressive technical parameters, broader application scenarios, larger funding... And then? These projects have gone through several waves; some have long fallen silent, some have become yesterday's news. Meanwhile, Bitcoin has always maintained the number one market cap, like a silent witness.

Perhaps this is the true essence of internal competition—not following the trend to pile on features, speed, or ecosystems, but doing one thing well and pushing it to the extreme. Slowing down requires confidence; persevering even more so. Satoshi Nakamoto gave us an example: sometimes, real strength lies not in speed, but in stability.