Bitcoin Scaling
Bitcoin Model T: Perfection Doesn't Need Improvement
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2 months agoon
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adminThe Ford Model T has been invented, the automobile has arrived and nothing else must be done! A hand crank start motor, rear wheel drive only, wooden wheels, and transmission based braking system with no wheel brakes. Why would anyone need anything else?
Who could need seatbelts? Proper wheel based braking systems? An automated ignition engine? Why would people need reinforced steel frames? Buckle zones? Navigation systems? Shatter-safe glass? Airbags?
The Model T is perfect, it is the peak of the automobile and contains all features anyone would ever need!
This is what Bitcoiners sound like when arguing 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 to shortcomings that put at risk its chance of success as a global monetary network.
As far as active flaws right now, OP_CODESEPARATOR allows the construction of blocks that could take up to thirty minutes for a node on high end consumer hardware to validate. This is a denial of service attack vector on network users. The timewarp attack, a method to artificially crank the difficulty of the network lower than it should go, can be accomplished by miners manipulating timestamps in their blocks. An especially small transaction can be used to trick SPV wallets into thinking it is an internal node in a merkle tree of the block, allowing a malicious miner to include entirely fake transactions inside a non-existent branch of the block’s merkle tree that doesn’t actually exist.
These are active design flaws right now, with an increasing incentive to take advantage of the more valuable Bitcoin grows. Some just allow a single malicious block to drastically 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 blocksize increase by lowering the difficulty and keeping it low in order 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 of it except hardforking.
That’s not to mention the massive shortcomings in terms of scalability. Bitcoin is simply not capable of supporting even a significant fraction of the world population in a self custodial way. If Bitcoin were to appreciate in value financially, most of the world would be relegated to custodial and trusted ways to interact with Bitcoin.
Lightning is very limited in how many channels can be opened or closed to enforce things on-chain in a high fee environment. The higher the fees, the more limited it will become 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 issue, the only way to do Ark right now is require every user in an Ark to all be online at the same time to pre-sign the necessary transactions to create an Ark. The more people, the higher the chance someone isn’t online and forces a non-cooperative case.
These issues cannot be solved without fundamental improvements to the Bitcoin protocol itself. Full stop. The limitations of the protocol as it is now does not give us the tool kit to properly solve these shortcomings in a way that does not compromise on the goal of providing people with a trustless form of interacting with their money.
People arguing that Bitcoin is good enough are brain dead cultists. They are no different than the hypothetical person who would argue the Ford Model T is enough, and there is nothing we can do to improve on it.
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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The public discussion around scaling in the last few years has become poisoned and captured by an incredibly toxic and defeatist 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?”
This attitude is permeating the entire space more and more as time goes on, with a plethora of different rationalizations and reasons for it depending on who you talk to. It is a completely defeatist, dystopian, and pessimistic view of the future. I say that as someone who is incredibly pessimistic about a large number of issues that I see in this ecosystem.
Talking yourself into losing is one of the fastest ways to wind up losing. Bitcoin as a distributed system depends on being dispersed enough, and having enough independent system participants, that it can resist the coercive or malicious influence of larger participants. This is critical to it continuing to function as a decentralized and censorship resistant system. If it cannot remain dispersed enough in its distribution then natural tendencies in networks will likely gravitate towards larger and more dense participants until they effectively have an outsized control over the whole network.
That will ultimately very likely spell the end for Bitcoin’s most important property: censorship resistance.
What is mind boggling to me is, even though we aren’t in a perfect place, we have made massive progress in the last decade. Ten years ago we had people screaming about raising the blocksize. Now we have the Lightning Network, Statechains, and now Ark. We have people experimenting with wildly improved federated custodial models using BitVM. We even have a vague inkling of ways to implement covenants without a softfork if some new cryptographic assumptions pan out and prove practical to implement in a usable way.
Even if we do bump into a ceiling eventually we can’t get around, every bit of ground we gain means room for more people to self custody. It means more room for more custodians, allowing more numerous small scale ones to enable people to custody with people they trust more than disconnected corporations, for that more numerous herd to impose greater competitive pressure for custodians in general. To maintain that wide dispersion of entities directly interacting with the network that it needs to maintain its decentralization.
Why are so many Bitcoiners willing to throw up their hands and give in to defeatist sentiment? Yes, we have more problems to solve than we did ten years ago, but we have also covered a massive amount of ground in expanding scalability in that ten years. This isn’t a binary situation, this isn’t a game where you win or lose with no middle ground. Every improvement to scalability we can make gives Bitcoin a higher chance of success. It entrenches and defends Bitcoin’s censorship resistance that much more.
I’m not saying that people should naively buy into every promised solution or hyped thing, there are definitely problems and limitations we should remain cognizant of. But that doesn’t mean throw in the towel and give up this early. There is so much potential here to actually reshape the world in a meaningful way, but that won’t happen overnight. It won’t happen at all if everyone just gives up and kicks back expecting to get rich and apathetically stops caring about it.
Blind pessimism and blind optimism are both poison, it’s time to start looking for a balance between the two rather than picking your drug of choice and sinking into delusion.
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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