The public debate about scaling in recent years has been poisoned and captured by an extremely toxic and lost attitude: “Why do you care?”
“Why bother trying to scale? Basic napkin math shows that no matter what we do for everyone to be self-preservation is impossible.”
“Why bother trying to scale? People are stupid and lazy anyway, even if we did people would just use a guardian anyway.”
“Why bother trying to scale? I've got mine, I'll be rich enough to take care of myself, who cares about the stupid and lazy plebs anyway?”
This idea is getting into the whole place more and more as time goes on, with plenty of different reasoning and reasons for it depending on who you talk to. It is a completely losing, dystopian, and pessimistic view of the future. I say that as someone who is extremely pessimistic about a large number of issues I see in this ecosystem.
Talking to yourself about loss is one of the fastest ways to end loss. Bitcoin as a distributed system depends on being sufficiently dispersed, and that there are enough independent system participants, that it can withstand the coercive or malicious influence of larger participants. This is essential for it to continue to function as a decentralized and censorship-resistant system. If it cannot remain sufficiently dispersed in its distribution then natural tendencies in networks are likely to increase towards larger and denser partners until they dominate the entire network.
That will most likely end up ending Bitcoin's most important property: resistance to censorship.
What boggles my mind is that even though we are not in a perfect place, we have made great progress in the last ten years. Ten years ago we had people screaming about building the blocks. Now the Lightning Network, Statechains, and now Ark. We have people experimenting with wildly developed federal defense models using BitVM. We even have a vague vision of ways to implement contracts without a softfork if so some new cryptographic assumptions emerge and prove to be practical to implement in a usable way.
Even if we eventually hit a ceiling we can't get around, every piece of land we gain means space for more people to self-preserve. It means there will be more room for more keepers, allowing more people on a small scale to let people get hold of people they trust more than independent corporations, for the herd to be more many of which put more competitive pressure on guardians in general. To maintain that wide dispersion of groups that interact directly with the network it needs to maintain its decentralization.
Why are so many Bitcoiners willing to throw up their hands and enter the loser's mindset? Yes, we have more problems to solve than we did ten years ago, but we've also covered a lot of ground in expanding scalability in those ten years. This is not a binary situation, this is not a game where you win or lose with no middle ground. Every improvement in scalability we can make gives Bitcoin a higher chance of success. It includes and protects against Bitcoin censorship much more.
I'm not saying that people should buy into every solution or hyped thing that has been promised, there are definitely problems and limitations that we should keep aware of. But that doesn't mean throw in the towel and give up early. There is so much potential here to reshape the world in a meaningful way, but it won't happen overnight. It won't happen at all if everyone just gives and kicks back expecting to get rich and never stop caring about it.
Blind pessimism and blind optimism are both toxic, it's time to start looking for a balance between the two rather than taking your favorite drug and drowning in delusion.
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.
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