There’s not enough positivity spread between projects that are more commonly considered rivals, rather than peers. I’m starting a new series called “Free Love Fridays” to dive into what I like about the best projects in crypto. Naturally, #Bitcoin is up first.

Bitcoin has had an outstanding few months as it surged through all-time highs, but these new benchmarks are the culmination of years of hard work by its community constructing the narrative of BTC as a hedge against the traditional financial system.

Bitcoin has solidified its migration from peer-to-peer cash to store-of-value / digital gold, and extended this narrative well beyond crypto twitter to famed investors and institutions who are now diving in.

Fiat currencies’ greatest feature, the ability to spur economic activity with policy changes, is also its greatest risk by placing too much power in the hands of central authorities.

Bitcoin’s hard cap is a simple, yet amazing invention to remove this risk entirely.

In addition to adopting the same hard cap model as Bitcoin, @avalancheavax also implements several other innovations from Bitcoin. Here are a few of my favorites:

UTXO Model - A brilliant creation of single-use credentials for payments. Superior to the account model because they are naturally garbage collecting. That’s why $AVAX also uses it.

Transaction format - By separating signatures from the rest of the transaction, Bitcoin makes it possible to discard signatures after verification. AVAX uses a very similar idea as well.

Bech32 addresses - This address format is error detecting, relatively compact, and easier to share over a phone, minimizing the likelihood of funds sent to unrecoverable addresses. AVAX adopts Bech32 in full.

Bitcoin’s deliberately limited scripting language enables nodes to cap their resource usage. Bitcoin transactions are guaranteed to execute in a small, finite amount of time.

At first, the limitations of the scripting language seem annoying. But the Bitcoin community has found clever tricks to encode complex logic into the limited language.

Our covenants work, that gave rise to vaults, which keep your coins secure at rest, is one example. MAST, which enables someone to expose a portion of the redeem script without revealing all of it, is another.

And I have always liked the colored coins, where you designate a satoshi to be, say, the deed to a house.

This is dangerous, because you do not want to accidentally drop your house while purchasing coffee, but the idea of digitizing assets is incredibly exciting and very much at the core of what we’re aiming for with Avalanche.

Like your first kiss, you’ll never forget Bitcoin. It has proven the power of open finance, and pioneered the ongoing transition from centralized systems where you are beholden to gatekeepers, to decentralized networks that benefit the individual.