By Bitcoin Magazine - 3 months ago - Reading Time: 8 minutes
BitcoinLavni an se rezèvasyon fraksyon: Sòf si nou fè yon bagay sou li
Ki sa ki te kòmanse kòm yon sèl tranzaksyon soti nan Satoshi Hal Finney, te evolye nan yon sistèm konplèks nan minè echèl endistriyèl, evolye meta-pwotokòl tankou Lightning Network la ak Fedimint, ak yon anbrase konplè nan envestisè enstitisyonèl ak dosye a kraze aflu nan divès kalite ki fèk apwouve. plas ETFs.
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.
Unfortunately this optimism, and sense of “inevitability” I have previously written on, 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.
Kwayans sa a se kategorikman fo.
The greatest danger to 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.
Fin vye granmoun Nouvèl
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 Hal Finney himself 14 years ago:
"Aktyèlman gen yon trè bon rezon pou Bitcoin-bank ki apiye egziste, bay pwòp lajan kach dijital yo, ki ka rachte pou yo 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…
pon Bitcoin tranzaksyon yo pral fèt ant bank yo, pou rezoud transfè nèt. Bitcoin transactions by private individuals will be as rare as… well, as Bitcoin acha ki baze sou jodi a."
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.
Nan liv White Lightning Network la li menm, otè Joseph Poon ak Thaddeus Dryja fè li klè ke pou kont li se pa nenpòt kalite bal an ajan ki pèmèt echèl mondyal la:
“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?
Trè tou senpleman, si yo pa kapab peye pou itilize pwotokòl debaz la oswa menm Rezo Zeklè a (pa bezwen menm diskite sou fasilite pou itilize oswa UX isit la, sa a se yon defi separe konsiderab) akòz limit évolutivité difisil, yo pral fòse yo sèvi ak founisè santralize ak gadyen. Menm si yo pa vle.
Pa gen okenn bat alantou ti touf bwa sa a oswa vle li ale.
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.
Gold Standard 2.0
Li se yon kesyon jis pou mande poukisa sa a ta ka poze yon pwoblèm nan tout. Hal Finney sètènman pa t 'sanble vle di konsa nan pwòp pòs li mansyone pi wo a.
Retounen nan 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.
Kòm yon rezilta, teknoloji papye lajan premye te vin itilize kòm pratik IOU pou lò, ki li menm yo te estoke nan kote santralize espesyalize nan travay la nan veye ak transfere gwo kantite lò jan sa nesesè. Apre yon tan, kòm teknoloji amelyore ak komès te vin pi mondyal, gadyen santralize sa yo sèlman kontinye grandi, jiskaske yo tout te evantyèlman kaptire pa eta yo atravè pouvwa regilasyon epi pita kareman fiat, ki konplètman koupe nouvo lajan fiat la nan sipò lò ki kache.
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 depo of bitcoin using private keys and mnemonic phrases, but in our hyperbitcoinization scenario the ability to tranzaksyon with self custodied bitcoin quickly evaporates for all but the institutions and the super wealthy who can afford the fees, even when using Lightning.
Konsekans yo se anpil menm jan yo te anba yon estanda lò. Platfòm tankou Coinbase oswa Cashapp pral pran plas prensipal, bay tranzaksyon ki nan platfòm gadyen yo gen zewo pri majinal paske yo jis swiv nan yon baz done santral. Peman kwa-platfòm yo ka rasanble tou ant platfòm sa yo ak chanèl Lightning oswa peman sou chèn nan yon pri trè efikas. Rezilta a se yon peyizaj ki pa twò diferan de eta estanda lò a nan kòmansman 20yèm syèk la, ak pifò rezèv ki te kenbe pa gwo enstitisyon gadyen ke Eta yo te kapab enfliyanse, fòse, ak kaptire.
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.
Esansyèlman, nan evènman an nan aksyon sa yo, a vas majorite de itilizatè yo ta pa gen okenn kapasite yo patisipe nan retire lajan nan pwòp gad pa yo.
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.
Men èske se sa?
Is the vision of Bitcoin as a foundational tool for censorship resistance, and separating money and State, dead?
Si nou kontinye refize, oswa pi mal ankouraje, trajectoire aktyèl la, Lè sa a, gen zewo dout ke li ye. Men, li pa dwe.
Egare laperèz
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.
Sepandan, li enpòtan pou nou rekonèt ki jan nou rive nan yon pwen ke "osifikasyon" te vin tounen yon bagay enpòtan. preskri naratif, olye ke yon piman deskriptif 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.
However we must also acknowledge that Segwit2x failed in a miserable fashion. Worse still, the futility of the attack was obvious before its eventual collapse as it entirely misjudged the dynamics involved in introducing changes to a distributed peer to peer protocol.
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.
Se konsa, sa ki kounye a
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 post 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 critical look at the issues surrounding the Lightning Network more specifically.
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.
Lè nou fè sa, petèt nou ka jwenn yon fason pou echèl vizyon vrèman kanmarad ak lajan souveren pou chak moun sou planèt la.
Nou ka trè byen toujou tonbe kout, epi pa gen absoliman okenn garanti.
Men, li vo yon piki.
Sa a se yon pòs envite pa Ariel Deschapell. Opinyon yo eksprime yo se antyèman pwòp yo epi yo pa nesesèman reflete sa yo ki nan BTC Inc oswa Bitcoin Magazin.
Sous orijinal: Bitcoin Magazine