By Bitcoin Časopis - pred 3 mesiacmi - Čas na čítanie: 8 minúty
BitcoinBudúcnosť 's je zlomková rezerva: pokiaľ s tým niečo neurobíme
To, čo začalo ako jediná transakcia od Satoshiho po Hala Finneyho, sa vyvinulo do komplexného systému baníkov v priemyselnom meradle, vyvíjajúcich sa metaprotokolov ako Lightning Network a Fedimint a plného objatia inštitucionálnych investorov s rekordným prílevom do rôznych novoschválených spotové ETF.
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.
Táto viera je kategoricky falošná.
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.
Staré správy
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:
„V skutočnosti je na to veľmi dobrý dôvod Bitcoin-podporované banky, aby existovali, vydávajúce svoju vlastnú digitálnu hotovostnú menu, splatiteľnú za 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…
most Bitcoin medzi bankami sa uskutočnia transakcie na vyrovnanie čistých prevodov. Bitcoin transactions by private individuals will be as rare as… well, as Bitcoin založené nákupy sú dnes.“
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.
V samotnom dokumente Lightning Network autori Joseph Poon a Thaddeus Dryja objasňujú, že samo osebe to nie je žiadny druh striebornej guľky umožňujúcej globálne rozmery:
“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?
Veľmi jednoducho, ak nemôžu dovoliť si používať základný protokol alebo dokonca Lightning Network (netreba tu ani diskutovať o jednoduchosti použitia alebo UX, to je samostatná veľká výzva) kvôli tvrdým limitom škálovateľnosti, budú nútení využívať centralizovaných a depozitných poskytovateľov. Aj keď nechcú.
Okolo tohto kríka sa nebije ani si želať, aby bol preč.
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.
Zlatý štandard 2.0
Je férová otázka položiť si otázku, prečo by to vôbec mohlo predstavovať problém. Zdá sa, že Hal Finney to vo svojom vlastnom vyššie uvedenom príspevku určite nenaznačil.
Návrat na stránku 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.
Výsledkom bolo, že technológia papierových peňazí sa prvýkrát začala používať ako vhodné IOU pre zlato, ktoré bolo uložené na centralizovaných miestach špecializovaných na stráženie a presun veľkého množstva zlata podľa potreby. Postupom času, ako sa technológia zdokonaľovala a obchod sa stal globálnejším, títo centralizovaní správcovia len naďalej rástli, až kým ich nakoniec nezmocnili štáty prostredníctvom regulačnej moci a neskôr priamo fiat, čo úplne oddelilo nové fiat peniaze od podkladového zlata.
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 skladovanie of bitcoin using private keys and mnemonic phrases, but in our hyperbitcoinization scenario the ability to transakcie with self custodied bitcoin quickly evaporates for all but the institutions and the super wealthy who can afford the fees, even when using Lightning.
Dôsledky sú v podstate rovnaké ako v prípade zlatého štandardu. Platformy ako Coinbase alebo Cashapp sa dostanú do centra pozornosti, keďže transakcie v rámci ich depozitných platforiem majú nulové marginálne náklady, keďže sa sledujú len v centrálnej databáze. Platby naprieč platformami môžu byť tiež agregované medzi týmito platformami pomocou kanálov Lightning alebo platieb v reťazci, ktoré sú mimoriadne nákladovo efektívne. Výsledkom je krajina, ktorá sa príliš nelíši od stavu zlatého štandardu na začiatku 20. storočia, pričom väčšinu ponuky vlastnia veľké opatrovnícke inštitúcie, ktoré štáty mohli triviálne ovplyvňovať, nútiť a zachytávať.
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.
Rozhodujúce je, že v prípade týchto akcií by veľká väčšina používateľov nemala možnosť zrušiť výber výberom finančných prostriedkov do svojej vlastnej úschovy.
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.
Ale je to tak?
Is the vision of Bitcoin as a foundational tool for censorship resistance, and separating money and State, dead?
Ak budeme naďalej popierať, alebo ešte horšie povzbudzovať súčasnú trajektóriu, potom niet pochýb, že je. Ale nemusí to tak byť.
Nenápadný strach
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.
Je však dôležité uznať, ako sme dosiahli taký bod, že „osifikácia“ sa stala významnou normatívne rozprávanie, nie čisto opisný 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.
Tak čo teraz
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 blog post 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 konkrétnejšie.
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.
Ak to urobíme, možno nájdeme spôsob, ako rozšíriť víziu skutočne peer to peer a suverénnych peňazí na každého jedného človeka na planéte.
Je možné, že stále zaostávame a neexistujú absolútne žiadne záruky.
Ale za pokus to stojí.
Toto je príspevok hosťa od Ariel Deschapell. Vyjadrené názory sú úplne ich vlastné a nemusia nevyhnutne odrážať názory BTC Inc alebo Bitcoin Magazine.
Originálny zdroj: Bitcoin časopis