Once concerns about Bitcoin's long-term prospects surface negatively, a common refrain is to dismiss it as “Well tell us what to do about it then. ” This is used to eliminate all concerns about governance leading to governance capture, a deeper involvement of certain groups leading to higher risks to the consensus process, of sorts any failure mode that includes Bitcoin's resistance to censorship and the ability to allow freedom to erode.
“Well, what's your plan?”
Use Bitcoin. Bitcoin consensus revolves around two important variables, economic actors and miners. Economic actors decide whether a set of consensus rules has value by deciding whether to honor their side of a transaction based on whether it is valid according to the consensus rules they have Miners decide which set of consensus rules to mine, choosing the one that gives them the highest value.
Users who actually use Bitcoin, that is to run and run transactions, services, and other protocols to make use of blockspace, are affected through both methods. A set of consensus rules requires two things, users to value it, and miners to mine. Users buy blockspace attracting miners with more income beyond what the block subsidy creates. To the extent that fees make up miners' income, consumers have that much “power” that generates those fees over miners. They decide if there is a disagreement about consensus rules which side to give that income to, meaning that miners had to follow those rules to earn it.
The risk of institutional adoption and regulatory suppression is a serious threat to Bitcoin in the long term if people simply stop doing anything with bitcoin but holding it. In that kind of environment, regulations can come down on miners and brokers and have a big impact on the events of consensus changes. They may try to block useful and valuable changes, and try to push for useless or destructive ones.
So what do we do to counter that? We actually use Bitcoin for more than holding and investing. That that's why scalability is so important. Because it allows more people to interact directly with the system in that way, to directly influence them. The more we use Bitcoin, the more influence users will have collectively in the future in terms of consensus.
If Bitcoiners are releasing bitcoin back to nothing more than an asset to keep, something that allows them to sit idle, then we will eventually lose it. We will lose our opinions and our influence in the markets that bitcoin enables, we will lose our influence on the consensus rules that miners choose to mine, we will lose it all.
Bitcoiners need to be active, not passive. We need to trade, we need to build more businesses, consume more block space. With payment networks like Lightning or Ark, reckless derivatives markets using DLCs, even stupid things like Ordinals and Inscriptions. The demand for block space must come from distributed and diverse sources, not just large institutions and companies that are easily controlled by regulatory and government influence.
Bitcoin is very much a “use it or lose it” thing. I'd rather not see it lost to people who really care about freedom due to apathy.
This article is a Take. The views expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
