In the past few years, public discourse on scaling has been poisoned by a toxic and demoralizing attitude. “Why bother?”
“Why bother trying to scale? Basic napkin math shows it’s impossible no matter what we do for everyone to self custody.”
“Why bother trying to scale? People are stupid and lazy anyway, even if we did people would just use a custodian anyways.”
“Why bother trying to scale? I’ve got mine, I’ll be rich enough for self custody, who cares about the stupid and lazy plebs anyways?”
The attitude of this kind is spreading more and more in the space, and there are many different reasons and rationalizations for it. It all depends on whom you ask. This is a pessimistic, dystopian and defeatist view of the world. As someone who’s incredibly pessimistic, I can say this about many of the issues I see within our ecosystem.
One of the fastest and easiest ways to lose is by talking yourself into it. Bitcoin, as a decentralized system, depends on having enough participants who are independent to be able to resist any coercive influence from large participants. It is crucial that it continues to operate as a decentralized, censorship-resistant system. If the distribution of participants is not sufficiently dispersed, then networks are likely to gravitate toward larger participants and denser ones until these individuals have a large control over all network.
It is very possible that Bitcoin will lose its most valuable property: the ability to resist censorship.
It is amazing to see how much progress we’ve made in the past decade, even though it isn’t perfect. Those who screamed about increasing the block size ten years ago are no longer around. We now have Ark, Statechains and the Lightning Network. BitVM has been used to create federated custody models that are radically improved. Even a faint inkling about how to implement covenants with a hardfork is available. You can also contact us if you have any questions. Some new cryptographic assumptions are useful and practical.
If we eventually hit a ceiling we are unable to overcome, then every inch we gain will allow more people the opportunity to be in charge of their own custody. This means that there is more space for more custodians. More small-scale ones will allow people to have custody with those they trust, rather than corporations. The more people who are involved, the more competitively pressured custodians can be. This wide distribution of entities that interact directly with the system is necessary to maintain decentralization.
Why do so many Bitcoiners give up and succumb to a defeatist attitude? We have more issues to resolve than we had ten year ago. But we’ve also made huge strides in terms of scalability. There is no binary outcome, there is not an option to lose or win. Bitcoin’s chances of succeeding are increased with every improvement we make to its scalability. The censorship-resistant nature of Bitcoin is further strengthened.
It’s not that I think people should blindly believe in every solution. But there are certainly problems and limitations to be mindful of. This doesn’t mean we should give up and throw in the towels. It is possible to reshape our world, but it won’t be overnight. This won’t be possible if people give up on their dreams and stop caring.
It’s better to find a middle ground between blind pessimism or blind optimism than choose your favorite drug and fall into delusion.
This is not a good article. Take. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and not BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
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Source: bitcoinmagazine.com
