The Ford Model T has been invented, the automobile has arrived and nothing else needs to be done! Manual crank start engine, rear wheel drive only, wood wheels, and transmission based braking system with no wheel brakes. Why would anyone need anything else?
Who might need seat belts? Suitable wheel-based braking systems? Automatic ignition engine? Why do people need reinforced steel frames? Synapse areas? Navigation systems? Break-safe glass? Airbags?
The Model T is perfect, it is the pinnacle of motoring and has all the features anyone could ever need!
This is what Bitcoin users look like when they argue vehemently and irrationally against any and all changes to Bitcoin. This is no longer a reasoned conservative position, but rather a pure dogmatic cult. Bitcoin has very serious problems that must be addressed, both in terms of active flaws and shortcomings that jeopardize its chances of success as a global monetary network.
Regarding currently active flaws, OP_CODESEPARATOR allows for the creation of blocks that may take up to thirty minutes for a node to be validated on high-end consumer devices. This is a denial of service attack on network users. A Timewarp attack, a method of artificially lowering network difficulty to a lower level than it should be, can be carried out by miners manipulating the timestamps in their blocks. A particularly small transaction can be used to trick SPV wallets into believing that it is an internal node in the block’s Merkle tree, allowing the malicious miner to embed entirely fake transactions within a non-existent branch of the block’s Merkle tree that does not actually exist.
These are design flaws that are active right now, with an increasing incentive to capitalize on the growth of a more valuable Bitcoin. Some only allow a single malicious block to significantly degrade network performance, others allow malicious miners to actively profit. Timewarp attack provides a way to force the entire network into an indirect attack Increase the block size By reducing the difficulty level and keeping it low in order to produce blocks at a much faster rate. If enough of the economy supported it to convince miners to implement it, there would be no way to opt out of it short of a hard fork.
Not to mention the huge shortcomings in terms of scalability. Bitcoin is simply unable to support even a significant portion of the world’s population in a self-protected manner. If the value of Bitcoin rises financially, most of the world will be moved to trustworthy and reliable ways of interacting with Bitcoin.
Lightning is very limited in the number of channels that can be opened or closed to force things on-chain in a high-fee environment. The higher the fees, the more limited they become in this regard. Another way to deal with this could be a ship in an optimistic state, but in an uncooperative state it becomes even worse. There is also another problem, the only way to create an Ark now is to require every user in the Ark to be online at the same time to pre-sign the transactions needed to create the Ark. The more people there are, the greater the chance that someone will go offline and force an uncooperative state.
These problems cannot be solved without fundamental improvements to the Bitcoin protocol itself. Full stop. The limitations of the protocol as it stands now do not give us the toolset needed to properly resolve these shortcomings in a way that does not compromise the goal of providing people with a trustless form of interaction with their money.
People who argue that Bitcoin is good enough are brain-dead cultists. They’re no different than the hypothetical person who might argue that the Ford Model T is adequate, and there’s nothing we can do to improve it.
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.
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