Bitcoin Model T: Perfection Doesn't Need Improvement

The 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.