Bitcoin's 17-year track record presents an interesting paradox. You look at it one way—a genuinely decentralized system where participants may not even know each other, let alone trust one another, yet it hasn't experienced any catastrophic collapse. That's pretty remarkable from a systems design perspective. Flip the lens though, and 17 years actually feels like a long time in crypto. The fact that something this radical, this uncoordinated, has managed to stay standing this long—with no central authority, no guaranteed mechanism forcing cooperation—speaks volumes about the resilience of the underlying architecture. Most centralized institutions would've crumbled under half the stress. When you think about it that way, the longevity becomes even more significant.