One counterargument against the push for more scalability with Bitcoin is that “most people won’t maintain their own anyway, so why bother?”
This is a hypothetical, arrogant and largely misleading argument. It’s the same kind of logical fallacy that only humans can commit. The current state of the present is an indicator of what the state will be like in the future.
“It’s not raining today, so it won’t rain tomorrow.” This is exactly the kind of thinking that led Bitcoin users during the last market cycle to believe that we would reach a peak of $100-200k at that time. This assumption was brutally destroyed by a double top at 69K, just 3.5 times the previous all-time high.
The nature of the digital age in which we live, and the many radical transformations we have all witnessed over short periods of time during our lifetimes alone, should shake people from their assumptions that the present is evidence of the nature of the future, but for many people it is not.
First, many people do not currently hold their coins themselves I don’t even understand the difference between self custody and their coins on Coinbase. For many unsophisticated users, they are just apps that hold their Bitcoin. I’ve encountered this misconception more times than I can count in the time I’ve spent in this space interacting with new users. These users have not been informed of this possibility yet, and their exclusion is considered silly and hypothetical.
Second, users who choose not to self-custody at this time generally do so out of fear of losing their keys. It is not a fear of “responsibility”. It is the fear that they will not be able to properly handle redundancy in their key department, and lose everything they have invested due to inefficiency, legitimate mistakes, or freak accidents.
This isn’t 2013 anymore. People don’t back up individual private keys to a digital file anymore. Major management plans have come a long way since then. Mnemonic seeds, multi-signature wallets, etc. There are also basic vaults that use pre-signed transactions, although they are not widely used. Tools exist to enable self-custodial in ways that provide guarantees and assistance in the event of errors and loss and the need to recover coin keys.
Unrestricted exists. Casa exists. Nunchucks are available. Your house is there. All of these tools will get better over time. By embracing Schnorr and Taproot, redemption-friendly self-custodial systems can blind third-party servers so that during signing and normal use these services do not learn anything about the coins users hold or the transactions they participate in signing. Taproot enables wallets to delegate emergency recovery keys to friends or family members without them knowing anything about those coins unless they are needed.
Tools around self-care are advancing, and people’s attitudes about self-care will change along with these tremendous advances in technology. Dismissing the need for scalability because people have reasons not to now is sheer arrogance.
It’s nothing more than an “I own my own, so fuck everyone” attitude. The current state of the world being a certain way does not guarantee that it will be that way in the future. Only the arrogant think that.
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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