The Ford Model T has been invented, the automobile has arrived and nothing more needs to be done! A crank starter, rear-wheel drive only, wooden wheels, and a transmission-based braking system with no wheel brakes. Why would anyone need anything else?
Who might need seat belts? Suitable wheel-based braking systems? A self-starting engine? Why would people need reinforced steel structures? Buckle areas? Navigation systems? Unbreakable glass? air bags?
The Model T is perfect, it is the pinnacle of automobile and contains all the features anyone could need!
This is what Bitcoiners sound like when they argue vehemently and irrationally against any and all changes to bitcoin. It is no longer a reasoned position of conservatism, it is pure dogmatic cultism. bitcoin has very serious problems to address, both in terms of active flaws and deficiencies that put its chances of success as a global monetary network at risk.
As for the bugs currently active, OP_CODESEPARATOR allows the construction of blocks that could take up to thirty minutes to validate on a node on high-end consumer hardware. This is a denial of service attack vector to network users. The time warp attack, a method of artificially increasing the network's difficulty below what it should be, can be achieved by manipulating timestamps on its blocks. An especially small transaction can be used to trick SPV wallets into believing it is an internal node in a block's merkle tree, allowing a malicious miner to include completely fake transactions within a non-existent branch of the block's merkle tree that does not they really exist.
These are active design flaws right now, with increasing incentive to take advantage of the growth of the more valuable bitcoin. Some simply allow a single malicious block to dramatically degrade network performance, others allow the malicious miner to actively profit. The timewarp attack offers a way to force the entire network along with an indirect attack. block size increase reducing the difficulty and keeping it low to produce blocks at a much faster rate. If enough of the economy supported it to convince miners to enforce it, there would be no way to opt out except through hardforking.
Not to mention the huge deficiencies in terms of scalability. bitcoin is simply not capable of supporting even a significant fraction of the world's population on a self-sustaining basis. If bitcoin were to appreciate financially, most of the world would be relegated to trusted, custodial ways of interacting with bitcoin.
Lightning is very limited in the number of channels that can be opened or closed to enforce things on-chain in a high fee environment. The higher the rates, the more limited it will be in this regard. Ark in an optimistic case can be another way to deal with this, but in the non-cooperative case it becomes even worse. There is also another problem, the only way to make Ark right now is to require all users of an Ark to be online at the same time to pre-sign the transactions necessary to create an Ark. The more people, the greater the chances that someone is not online and forces an uncooperative case.
These problems cannot be solved without fundamental improvements to the bitcoin protocol itself. Final point. The limitations of the protocol as it stands now do not give us the toolset to adequately address these shortcomings in a way that does not compromise the goal of giving people a trustless way to interact with their money.
People who argue that bitcoin is good enough are brain dead cultists. They are no different than the hypothetical person who would say that the Ford Model T is enough and there is nothing we can do to improve it.
This article is a Carry. The opinions expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of btc Inc or bitcoin Magazine.
