One argument against pushing for greater scalability with Bitcoin is that “most people don't maintain themselves anyway, so why bother? ”
This is a wild, arrogant, and completely false argument. This is the same kind of logical fallacy that human beings can't help but make. The condition of today is an indication of what the condition will be in the future.
“It's not raining today, so it won't be raining tomorrow.” This is exactly the kind of thinking that led Bitcoiners in the last market cycle to be sure that we will hit 100-200 thousand dollars at that time. That assumption was brutally destroyed by a double-top at 69 miles, just ~3.5x from the all-time high.
The nature of the digital age we live in, and the many radical transformations we've all seen within a short span of our lives should shake people out of their assumptions. They believe that the present is a testament to the nature of the future, but for many people it is not.
First of all, many people do not keep their own coins at the moment do not even understand the difference between self storage and their coins sitting on Coinbase. For many users who don't know, they are all just apps that hold the bitcoin. I have encountered this misconception more times than I can count in my time in this space interacting with newer users. These users aren't even aware of the possibility yet, it's just absurd and suspicious to discount them.
Second, users who choose not to self-book now generally don't for fear of losing their keys. It is not a fear of “responsibility”. The fear is that they will not be able to properly handle the loss of work in their top management, and that they will lose everything they have invested due to incompetence or legitimate mistakes or freak accidents.
This isn't 2013 anymore. People no longer make backup copies of individual private keys in a digital file. Master management schemes have come a long way since then. There are mnemonic seeds, multisignature wallets, etc. Basic vaults using pre-signed transactions even exist, although they are not widely used. There are tools to perform self-maintenance in ways that offer safeguards and helping hands in case of errors and the need to recover lost coin keys.
There is unchained. There is a leg. There is a Nunchuck. Bitkey is there. All these tools will get even better as time goes on. Including Schnorr and Taproot, these recovery-friendly self-hosted schemes can blind third-party servers so that these services don't even learn anything about the coins users or the transactions they sign up for when they sign up and normal usage. Taproot enables wallets to delegate emergency recovery keys to friends or family members without them knowing about these coins if they are not needed.
Tools around self-preservation are evolving, and people's attitudes towards self-preservation will change along with these great advances in technology. Minimizing the need for scalability is pure arrogance because people have reasons not to at the moment.
It's nothing more than the “I've got mine, so fuck everyone else” attitude. The current state of the world in no way guarantees that it will be so in the future. Only the horrible accept it that way.
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.
