The public discussion about expansion in the last few years has become toxic and taken over by an incredibly toxic and defeatist attitude: “Why should we care?”
“Why bother trying to expand? Basic napkin calculations show that it is impossible for everyone to hold their own no matter what we do.
“Why bother trying to expand? People are stupid and lazy anyway, even if we did, people would use the guardian anyway.
“Why bother trying to expand? I’ve got mine, I’ll be rich enough to take care of myself, who cares about stupid and lazy commoners anyway?”
This attitude permeates the entire space more and more as time goes on, with a plethora of different justifications and reasons depending on who you talk to. It is a defeatist, miserable and utterly pessimistic view of the future. I say that as someone who is incredibly pessimistic about a large number of problems I see in this ecosystem.
Convincing yourself that you are losing is one of the quickest ways to get over losing. Bitcoin as a distributed system depends on being sufficiently dispersed, and having enough independent participants in the system, that it can resist the coercive or malicious influence of larger participants. This is critical to continue functioning as a decentralized and censorship-resistant system. If it cannot remain sufficiently dispersed in its distribution, natural tendencies in networks are likely to gravitate toward larger and denser participants until they have significant control over the entire network.
It is very likely that this will eventually lead to the end of Bitcoin’s most important property: censorship resistance.
What boggles my mind is that although we are not in a perfect situation, we have made tremendous progress in the past decade. Ten years ago we had people screaming about increasing the block size. Now we have the Lightning Network, Statechains, and now Ark. We have people experimenting with greatly improved federal custodial models using BitVM. We also have a vague idea of ways to enforce covenants without the need for a soft fork if Some of the new cryptographic assumptions have proven successful and have been shown to be practical to implement in a usable way.
Even if we eventually hit the ceiling, we won’t be able to turn around, every bit of ground we gain means space for more people to self-care. It means more room for more guardians, allowing for a greater number of small-scale guardians to enable people to incubate with people they trust more than with separate companies, so that this more numerous herd imposes greater competitive pressure on guardians overall. To maintain this wide dispersion of entities that directly interact with the network you need to maintain decentralization.
Why do so many Bitcoin users want to throw up their hands and give in to defeatist sentiments? Yes, we have more problems to solve than we did ten years ago, but we’ve also covered a tremendous amount of ground in expanding scalability in those ten years. This is not a binary situation, and this is not a game where you win or lose without compromise. Every improvement we can make to scalability gives Bitcoin a greater chance of success. It entrenches and defends Bitcoin’s resistance to censorship much more.
I am not saying that people should naively believe every promised solution or thing that is promoted, there are certainly problems and limitations that we must remain aware of. But this does not mean giving up and giving up early. There is a lot of potential here to reshape the world in a meaningful way, but it won’t happen overnight. It would never happen if everyone gave up and went back expecting to get rich and carelessly stopped caring about it.
Blind pessimism and blind optimism are both poison, it is time to start looking for a balance between the two instead of choosing your drug of choice and drowning in illusion.
This article is a takes. The opinions expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.