Author: Shinobi, Bitcoin Magazine; Translated by: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance
In recent years, public discussions about scaling have been poisoned and captured by an extremely toxic and defeatist attitude: 'Why bother?'
"Why bother trying to scale? Basic napkin math shows that no matter what we do, it’s impossible for everyone to self-custody."
"Why bother trying to scale anyway? People are stupid and lazy; even if we do it, people will just use custodians."
"Why bother trying to scale? I have mine, I’ll get rich enough to self-custody, who cares about those stupid and lazy common people?"
Over time, this attitude has increasingly permeated the entire space, with numerous rationalizations and reasons depending on who you talk to. It is a complete defeatist, dystopian, and pessimistic future. I say this as someone who is extremely pessimistic about the numerous problems I see in this ecosystem.
Convincing yourself that failure is one of the fastest ways to lead to failure. Bitcoin, as a distributed system, relies on sufficient decentralization and a sufficient number of independent system participants to resist coercive or malicious influences from larger participants. This is crucial for it to continue functioning as a decentralized and censorship-resistant system. If it cannot maintain sufficient distributed characteristics, the natural tendencies in the network may attract larger, denser participants until they effectively have enormous control over the entire network.
This likely ultimately means the most important attribute of Bitcoin: the end of censorship.
What I find incredible is that despite our situation not being perfect, we have made tremendous progress over the past decade. Ten years ago, people were loudly calling for increased block size. Now we have the Lightning Network, Statechains, and now Ark. We have people using BitVM to attempt significantly improved collaborative custody models. If some new cryptographic assumptions succeed and are proven to be implementable in a usable way, we even have a vague understanding of how to implement contracts without a soft fork.
Even if we eventually hit a ceiling and cannot escape, every bit of sufficient reason we gain means more space for people to self-custody. This means more custodians have more room, allowing more small custodial entities to enable people to trust their custodians more than isolated companies, as more groups will create greater competitive pressure on custodians. To maintain the broad decentralization of entities that interact directly with the network, its decentralization must be upheld.
Why are so many Bitcoin enthusiasts willing to throw up their hands and succumb to defeatist sentiments? Yes, we have more problems to solve compared to ten years ago, but in that decade, we have also made enormous progress in scaling. This is not a binary situation; it is not a win-or-lose game without middle ground. Every improvement we make to scalability gives Bitcoin a higher chance of success. It further reinforces and defends Bitcoin's censorship resistance.
I am not saying that people should naively believe every promised solution or hyped-up idea; we should indeed recognize some problems and limitations. But that doesn’t mean we should give up early and throw in the towel. There is enormous potential to truly reshape the world in a meaningful way, but it won't happen overnight. If everyone gives up and relaxes their expectations of getting rich and apathetically stops caring, then it simply won’t happen.
Both blind pessimism and blind optimism are poisons; it's time to start seeking a balance between the two, rather than choosing your preferred drug and falling into delusion.
