The public discussion about scaling in recent years has been poisoned and captured by an incredibly toxic and defeatist attitude: “Why bother?”
“Why bother to scale? Basic math on napkins shows that no matter what we do, it is impossible to give everyone self-control.”
“Why bother to scale? People are stupid and lazy anyway, even if we did that, people would still just use a custodian.
“Why bother to scale? I have mine, I will be rich enough for self-guardianship, who even cares about the stupid and lazy plebs?”
This attitude becomes more and more pervasive throughout the room as time goes by, 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 lot of the problems I see in this ecosystem.
Talking yourself into losing is one of the fastest ways to ultimately lose. Bitcoin as a distributed system depends on sufficient distribution and sufficient independent system participants so that it can withstand the coercive or malevolent influence of larger participants. This is crucial to continue functioning as a decentralized and censorship-resistant system. If its distribution cannot remain sufficiently dispersed, the natural tendencies in networks will likely lean toward larger and denser participants, until they effectively have outsized control over the entire network.
Ultimately, that will most likely mean the end of Bitcoin’s most important characteristic: resistance to censorship.
What’s mind-blowing to me is that even though we’re not in the perfect place, we’ve made tremendous progress in the last decade. Ten years ago we had people screaming about increasing block size. Now we have the Lightning Network, Statechains and now Ark. We have people experimenting with vastly improved federated custody models using BitVM. We even have a vague idea of ways to implement covenants without a soft fork as a number of new cryptographic assumptions emerge and prove practical to implement in a useful way.
Even if we eventually hit a ceiling we can’t avoid, every bit of ground we gain means space for more people to gain self-control. It means more room for more managers, which means there can be more small-scale managers who can give people the opportunity to work with people they trust more than for stand-alone companies, so that that more numerous herd can put greater competitive pressure on managers in general . To maintain the wide distribution of entities interacting directly with the network, this is necessary to maintain its decentralization.
Why are so many Bitcoiners willing to raise their hands and give in to defeatist sentiments? Yes, we have more problems to solve than we did ten years ago, but we have also made tremendous progress in expanding scalability in those ten years. This is not a binary situation, this is not a win or lose game with no middle ground. Every scalability improvement we can make gives Bitcoin a greater chance of success. It further entrenches and defends Bitcoin’s resistance to censorship.
I’m not saying that people should naively believe in every promised solution or hyped thing; there are certainly issues and limitations that we need to remain aware of. But that doesn’t mean you throw in the towel and give up so early. There is so much potential here to actually reshape the world in a meaningful way, but it won’t happen overnight. It won’t happen at all if everyone just gives up and backs off expecting to get rich and apathetically stops caring.
Blind pessimism and blind optimism are both poison. It’s time to look for a balance between the two, instead of choosing your drug of choice and falling into delusions.
This article is a To take. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.