By Bitcoin Revista - Hace 3 meses - Tiempo de lectura: 8 minutos
BitcoinEl futuro es la reserva fraccionaria: a menos que hagamos algo al respecto
Lo que comenzó como una única transacción de Satoshi a Hal Finney, ha evolucionado hasta convertirse en un complejo sistema de mineros a escala industrial, metaprotocolos en evolución como Lightning Network y Fedimint, y una aceptación total de inversores institucionales con entradas récord en varios recientemente aprobados. ETF al contado.
Bitcoin has come a dramatically long way, and with that comes a somewhat earned sense of optimism for those who have invested their time, money, and enthusiasm.
Lamentablemente, este optimismo y la sensación de “inevitabilidad” He escrito anteriormente sobre, has contributed to a culture of complacency. This is hallmarked by a narrative that early Bitcoin protocol ossification is acceptable or even desirable, itself underscored by the implicit assumption that the largest risks to Bitcoin now are potential changes and Trojan horses to the protocol.
Esta creencia es categóricamente falsa.
El mayor peligro para Bitcoin is the certain future it has if it were in fact to effectively “ossify” today: Certain regulatory capture, an uncapped fractional reserve supply, and censored and monitored transactions.
Noticias Antiguas
If that sounds extreme, then you haven’t been paying attention. The problems facing Bitcoin that lead to this inevitable result aren’t remotely new. In fact it was touched on by El propio Hal Finney hace 14 años:
“En realidad hay una muy buena razón para Bitcoin-existan bancos respaldados por ellos, que emitan su propia moneda en efectivo digital, canjeable por bitcoins. Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain…
Bitcoin backed banks will solve these problems…
La mayoría de las Bitcoin Las transacciones se producirán entre bancos, para liquidar las transferencias netas. Bitcoin Las transacciones realizadas por particulares serán tan raras como... bueno, como Bitcoin based purchases are today.”
From the very beginning, many of Bitcoin’s earliest adopters clearly understood its limitations and the resulting downstream implications. What has changed since then? Not the math.
Even with the Lightning Network, an innovation that Hal Finney would not be around to see, the upper limit for the number of regular users Bitcoin can onboard in its current state is optimistically 100 million. That number does not factor in usability/user experience whatsoever, which is an inherent challenge of the Lightning Network due to the very novel way in which it works compared to any other financial system.
En el documento técnico de Lightning Network, los autores Joseph Poon y Thaddeus Dryja dejan en claro que por sí solo no es ningún tipo de solución milagrosa que permita la escala global:
“If all transactions using Bitcoin were conducted inside a network of micropayment channels, to enable 7 billion people to make two channels per year with unlimited transactions inside the channel, it would require 133 MB blocks (presuming 500 bytes per transaction and 52560 blocks per year)”
The resulting cap on users who can leverage Bitcoin today in a self sovereign way without the use of a trusted 3rd party presents an obvious problem. Especially if we assume adoption and usage will continue to grow.
Saifdean Ammous authored “The Bitcoin Standard”, a book which received much fanfare for making the compelling economic case for Bitcoin as the ultimate manifestation of “hard money”. A Bitcoin standard, he argues, will out-compete the current fiat money system by virtue of its hard supply. Similarly, in 2014 Pierre Rochard popularized the idea of the “speculative attack”, arguing that the adoption of the bitcoin monetary unit would happen first gradually, then extremely rapidly.
In our projection of the future, we will assume both lines of thinking are correct, and that demand for bitcoin the monetary unit will attract an increasing amount of savings as its network effects only further accelerate its own widespread global adoption.
This “hyperbitcoinization” scenario however presents an impossible challenge for the current constraints of both the Bitcoin core protocol and Lightning Network. What will it mean then when hundreds of millions, and then billions, flee into the confidence of Bitcoin’s fixed supply as the mainstream Bitcoin community believes they will?
Muy simple, si no pueden permitirse usar el protocolo central o incluso Lightning Network (no es necesario ni siquiera discutir la facilidad de uso o UX aquí, ese es un desafío importante aparte) debido a límites estrictos de escalabilidad, se verán obligados a utilizar proveedores centralizados y de custodia. Incluso si no quieren.
No hay que andarse con rodeos ni desear que desaparezca.
If you accept the premise of bitcoin as a superior money, and also understand the practical limitations of the protocol today, then this is the certain outcome Bitcoin is currently on track to reach.
Estándar de oro 2.0
Es justo preguntarse por qué esto podría plantear un problema. Hal Finney ciertamente no pareció dar a entender eso en su publicación antes mencionada.
Volviendo a la Bitcoin Standard, Ammous dedicates a significant amount of the book’s opening chapters to discussing the history of the gold standard, its strengths, and most importantly its weaknesses. Crucially he identifies the Achilles heel: Gold was simply too expensive to secure and difficult to transact with in meaningful quantities.
Como resultado, la tecnología del papel moneda empezó a utilizarse como convenientes pagarés para el oro, que a su vez se almacenaba en ubicaciones centralizadas especializadas en la tarea de custodiar y transferir grandes cantidades de oro según fuera necesario. Con el tiempo, a medida que la tecnología mejoró y el comercio se volvió más global, estos custodios centralizados continuaron creciendo, hasta que eventualmente fueron capturados por los Estados a través del poder regulatorio y luego directamente por ley, lo que separó por completo el nuevo dinero fiduciario del respaldo de oro subyacente.
In projecting the future for Bitcoin in its current state, we can see a very similar outcome unfolding. There might not be a cost issue with the STORAGE of bitcoin using private keys and mnemonic phrases, but in our hyperbitcoinization scenario the ability to tramitar with self custodied bitcoin quickly evaporates for all but the institutions and the super wealthy who can afford the fees, even when using Lightning.
Las consecuencias son muy parecidas a las que ocurrían bajo el patrón oro. Plataformas como Coinbase o Cashapp ocuparán un lugar central, dado que las transacciones dentro de sus plataformas de custodia tienen un costo marginal cero, ya que simplemente se rastrean en una base de datos central. Los pagos multiplataforma también se pueden agregar entre estas plataformas con canales Lightning o pagos en cadena de manera extremadamente rentable. El resultado es un panorama que no es muy diferente del estado del patrón oro a principios del siglo XX, con la mayor parte de la oferta en manos de grandes instituciones de custodia sobre las que los Estados podían influir, coaccionar y capturar trivialmente.
To return to the question of the biggest threat to Bitcoin: In this future, there’s zero necessity in attacking the base layer if the only ones that can actually use it are large known entities with everything to lose.
To be sure, substantial differences from the original gold standard would in fact exist. Transactions being natively digital, proof of reserves being possible, and the supply being completely transparent are notable improvements over the gold standard. Still, none of these differences impact our self custody conundrum in any way. As far as the vision of Bitcoin being a censorship resistant money, once the vast majority is held by trusted third parties, there is nothing stopping States from strictly enforcing transaction monitoring, asset seizures, and capital controls. There is also nothing stopping them from enabling and even encouraging fractional reserve policies in the interest of prudent economic management.
Fundamentalmente, en caso de estas acciones, la gran mayoría de los usuarios no tendrían la posibilidad de optar por no retirar fondos bajo su propia custodia.
It’s not all bad. In this scenario, bitcoin the monetary unit still appreciates by leaps and bounds. Everyone who’s humored me this far with their attention will still likely stand to financially benefit immensely in this future.
¿Pero es eso?
Is the vision of Bitcoin as a foundational tool for censorship resistance, and separating money and State, dead?
Si seguimos negando, o peor aún, fomentando, la trayectoria actual, entonces no hay duda de que así es. Pero no tiene por qué ser así.
Miedo fuera de lugar
Fortunately, there’s no reason or prevailing argument for the Bitcoin network to have already ossified. It remains firmly within the grasp of the core community to continue to push forward research, debate, and proposals for further improving the base protocol to increase the scale and usability of solutions like the Lightning Network, as well as enable whole new potential constructs such as the Ark protocol, advanced statechains, and more.
Sin embargo, es importante reconocer cómo hemos llegado a tal punto que la "osificación" se convirtió en un problema importante. preceptivo narrativa, en lugar de una puramente descriptivo idea of the eventual end state of a widely adopted Bitcoin protocol. Such a prescription is necessarily rooted in the assumption that Bitcoin’s largest attack vector comes from future code changes.
This line of thinking isn’t baseless. It is true that protocol changes can be an attack vector. After all, we’ve actually seen that very attack play out before with Segwit2X when a consortium of large Bitcoin institutions and miners coordinated a unilateral hard fork to the Bitcoin protocol to increase the base block size in 2017.
Sin embargo, también debemos reconocer que Segwit2x falló de manera miserable. Peor aún, el La inutilidad del ataque era obvia. antes de su eventual colapso, ya que juzgó completamente mal la dinámica involucrada en la introducción de cambios en un protocolo distribuido de igual a igual.
The participation of many of the individuals and companies involved with Segwit2X suffered lasting reputational damage in many cases, making it not only a failed effort, but a costly one. For any enterprising attacker looking to compromise Bitcoin for good, it would be abundantly clear that attempting to repeat this approach or any variation of it is a fool's errand.
A much easier and cheaper approach with a much higher likelihood of success, would be to invest in slowing the already challenging work of building consensus to introduce beneficial extensions to the Bitcoin protocol, ensuring that the experiment in both sound and censorship resistant money is ultimately a victim of its own success. Whether or not you believe this is actively happening today, the actions that need to be taken are identical.
Y ahora qué
Ultimately, where we are now and what we must do is not so different from the time Hal made his observation in 2009: We must continue critically examining the limitations of the Bitcoin protocol and ecosystem, and push forward as a community to address these shortcomings.
Thankfully a number of research advancements and proposals have been made for further increasing scalability that don’t require larger block sizes. Bitcoin core contributor James O’Beirne released a del blog last year with a sober technical analysis of Bitcoin’s immediate scalability prospects and gives good context to some of these proposals, and more recently Mutiny wallet developer Ben Carman has taken a mirada crítica a los problemas que rodean a Lightning Network más específicamente.
There has never ceased to be a strong signal amidst all the noise, and the best we can do is put in the individual work to identify and amplify it, while actively pushing back against counter productive narratives that do not contribute to meaningfully improving Bitcoin.
Al hacer eso, tal vez podamos encontrar una manera de ampliar la visión de un dinero verdaderamente soberano y entre pares a todas las personas del planeta.
Es muy posible que todavía nos quedemos cortos y no hay absolutamente ninguna garantía.
Pero vale la pena intentarlo.
Esta es una publicación invitada de Ariel. Deschapell. Las opiniones expresadas son totalmente propias y no reflejan necesariamente las de BTC Inc o Bitcoin Revista.
Fuente original: Bitcoin Revista