Author: Shinobi, Bitcoin Magazine; Translated by: Tao Zhu, Jinse 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 up? Basic napkin math suggests that no matter what we do, it's impossible for everyone to self-custody.”
“Why bother trying to scale up? After all, people are stupid and lazy, and even if we do, they will only use custodians.”
“Why bother trying to scale up? I have mine, I will become rich enough to self-custody, who cares about those stupid and lazy common folks?”
Over time, this attitude has increasingly permeated the entire space, with a multitude of different rationalizations and reasons depending on who you talk to. This 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 oneself that failure is the fastest way to achieve failure. Bitcoin, as a distributed system, relies on sufficient decentralization and a sufficient number of independent system participants to withstand coercion or malicious influence 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, then the natural tendencies within the network may attract larger, more concentrated participants until they effectively have immense control over the entire network.
This will ultimately likely mean Bitcoin's most important attribute: the end of censorship.
It’s incredible to me that despite our circumstances not being perfect, we have made tremendous progress in the last decade. Ten years ago, there were loud calls to increase block size. Now we have the Lightning Network, Statechains, and now Ark. We have people using BitVM to attempt a significantly improved joint custody model. If some new cryptographic assumptions succeed and prove to be implementable in a usable way, we even have a vague understanding of ways to implement contracts without soft forks.
Even if we eventually hit a ceiling and can’t escape, every bit of justification we gain means more space for self-custody. This means more custodians have more room, allowing more small-scale custodians to enable people to trust them more than isolated companies, as larger groups will put more competitive pressure on custodians. To maintain the broad decentralization of entities interacting directly with the network, its decentralization needs to be sustained.
Why are so many Bitcoin enthusiasts willing to raise their hands and surrender to defeatism? Yes, we have more problems to solve compared to ten years ago, but in that decade, we have also made tremendous progress in scaling scalability. This is not a binary situation; this is not a win-lose game without middle ground. Every improvement we make to scalability increases the chances of Bitcoin’s success, further solidifying and defending Bitcoin against censorship.
I am not saying that people should naively believe every promised solution or hype, we should indeed recognize certain issues and limitations. But that doesn’t mean we should give up and throw in the towel early. There is immense potential to truly reshape the world in a meaningful way, but this won’t happen overnight. If everyone gives up and relaxes their expectations for wealth and becomes indifferent, it simply won’t happen.
Blind pessimism and blind optimism are both toxic; it’s time to start seeking balance between the two, rather than choosing your drug and falling into delusion.
