The public debate about scaling up in recent years has been poisoned and captured by an incredibly toxic and defeatist attitude: “Why bother?”
“Why bother trying to climb? Basic math shows that no matter what we do, it is impossible for everyone to have their own custody.”
“Why bother trying to climb? “People are stupid and lazy anyway, even if we did, people would just use a custodian anyway.”
“Why bother trying to climb? I have mine, I'll be rich enough to have my own custody, who cares about stupid lazy commoners anyway?
This attitude is increasingly permeating the entire space as time goes on, with a plethora of different rationalizations and reasons depending on who you talk to. It is a completely defeatist, dystopian and pessimistic vision of the future. I say this as someone who is incredibly pessimistic about a lot of problems I see in this ecosystem.
Convincing yourself to lose is one of the quickest ways to end up losing. bitcoin as a distributed system depends on being sufficiently dispersed and having enough independent participants in the system to be able to resist the coercive or malicious influence of larger participants. This is essential for it to continue functioning as a decentralized and censorship-resistant system. If you can't stay dispersed enough in your distribution, then natural tendencies in networks will likely gravitate toward larger, denser participants until they effectively have enormous control over the entire network.
Ultimately, that will most likely spell the end of bitcoin's most important property: censorship resistance.
What I find mind-blowing is that, although we are not in a perfect place, we have made enormous progress in the last decade. Ten years ago we had people screaming about increasing the block size. Now we have Lightning Network, Statechains and now Ark. We have people experimenting with tremendously improved federated custody models using BitVM. We even have a vague idea of how to implement conventions without a softfork. Yeah Some new cryptographic assumptions are practical and practical to implement in a usable way.
Even if we eventually hit a ceiling we can't get around, every piece of land we gain means space for more people to self-storage. It means more room for more custodians, allowing more small-scale custodians to allow people to custody with people they trust more than with disconnected corporations, so that larger herd puts greater competitive pressure on custodians overall. Maintaining that wide dispersion of entities that interact directly with the network needs to maintain its decentralization.
Why are so many Bitcoiners willing to give up and give in to defeatist sentiment? Yes, we have more problems to solve than we did ten years ago, but we've also come a long way in expanding scalability in those ten years. This is not a binary situation, it is not a game where you win or lose with no middle ground. Every improvement we can make in scalability gives bitcoin a greater chance of success. It further strengthens and defends bitcoin's censorship resistance.
I'm not saying that people should naively accept every solution promised or every thing advertised; There are definitely issues and limitations that we need to be aware of. But that doesn't mean throwing in the towel and giving up so soon. There is a lot of potential here to reshape the world significantly, but that won't happen overnight. It won't happen at all if everyone just gives up and relaxes hoping to get rich and apathetically stops caring about it.
Both blind pessimism and blind optimism are poison, it is time to start looking for a balance between the two instead of choosing the drug of choice and sinking into illusion.
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.
