Author: Eric Lombrozo, early Bitcoin core developer Translation: Shan Oppa, Golden Finance< /p>
I haven’t written a long article for a long time. But too much has been going on lately, and although I long to get away from it all, I have too many thoughts on my mind to remain silent. My understanding and perspective on Bitcoin have changed dramatically over the past few years, and it's difficult to convey this succinctly. But before you try it, let me warn you: not everything will be pleasant. Some were hard to accept, some were cruel, and some were so bad that I didn’t want to post anything for a while until my mind calmed down.
But first, let’s start with the good.
Bitcoin works! The network has been operating successfully for many years without downtime or critical failure. unstoppable. Little need for large-scale coordinated efforts.
Over a long enough time frame, the value of Bitcoin continues to grow significantly. Much more than many of us expected just a few years ago. And it holds its value better than the dollar, the euro, or any other national currency, and even better than most real estate and stocks.
A lot of great people working on a lot of great projects. There are many wonderful events and conferences organized around Bitcoin. It was really inspiring to see so many people working so hard on something that almost everyone initially scoffed at and thought was completely crazy and stupid. Hats off to all of you!
Public interest continues to grow. Love it or hate it, it's inevitable to hear about it from various media outlets. It has received strong support from many public figures, including many celebrities as well as several heads of state.
Many of the most talented and experienced developers from the early stages are still with us, continue to contribute and remain very active .
Now about the bad side:
bits The coin has proven quite difficult to scale, remains difficult for many to use, and its default privacy is terrible. While I remain optimistic about future improvements, some of these problems are so fundamental that there are no easy solutions. For example, initial synchronization time, resource requirements, high on-chain fees, and a difficult-to-use non-managed UX (especially if you want privacy) will remain serious challenges for most people for the foreseeable future.
Additionally, as Bitcoin grows in size and value, it continues to attract more and more malicious scammers. Long gone are the good old days when we could just be nerds and not think too much about the bad guys and what they might be up to.
Additionally, availability and scalability issues have led to an unsettling concentration of Bitcoin holdings in a few entities.
I would really like to see more people keep their own Bitcoin, but we have to face the fact that most people don’t want a lot of responsibility , they just want to push a button and let someone else do the thinking and do all the dirty work for them. This situation is not changing anytime soon and may even get worse.
Finally, the ugly side:
By design, Bitcoin does not Built-in protocol update mechanism, especially no consensus rule change mechanism. Absolutely not. Consensus rule changes are a Pandora's box, and once people start changing the rules, Bitcoin can, in principle, be turned into anything, even into the highly permissioned financial tyranny used for mass surveillance that it was meant to protect people from. tool. Now it's obvious that Satoshi didn't really think about this part, although these questions aren't particularly relevant considering that when Bitcoin was worth just a few cents, no one really cared, and two or three people had complete control over all software deployments, either It's hard to blame him.
Even in a completely apolitical environment, finding a way to smoothly deploy a soft fork from a technical perspective requires a huge effort and takes many years. , and it requires the joint efforts of many smart and talented people. Much of this work was completed after Satoshi Nakamoto left. Despite Satoshi's brilliance, I'm pretty sure he didn't come away with a good solution to these problems, and I'm not even sure he ever really thought about them seriously. These problems proved to be very difficult, much more difficult than initially expected.
There was a time when we were more optimistic. For example BIP9. In hindsight, BIP9 seems like a pipe dream.
Before Segwit is activated, soft forks will be activated regularly and most users won't even need to know or care about them. It seemed at the time that we would soon find a universal solution to the problem and that the process would soon become routine. But during the fork wars (2015-2017), Bitcoin was nearly torn apart. But that optimism quickly faded.
For better or worse,the result of the fork war is the current unstable stable equilibrium, no one wants to disrupt the consensus rules, and we no longer have the means Coordinate new soft forks without making them inherently political. We now know it’s going to get really, really ugly! On the plus side, this prevented further large-scale wars due to fear of mutual destruction. But the downside is that it leads to a virtual paralysis of further improvements to Bitcoin’s base layer.
Some may want to blame this on specific individuals. Or some laser eye cult. Or some other nonsense. But the truth is, this is a fundamental limitation of Bitcoin technology and a social dynamic that has evolved organically in response to perceived threats, some of which may be imaginary, but some of which are very, very real.
I wrote a short article on X a while back that covered three categories of risks inherent in any protocol update. I'll briefly review some of them here.
The three categories are:
Technical risk
Consensus risk
Process and precedent risk
Technical risk is an issue facing most mission-critical software projects. Such as vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities introduced by mistake or unintentionally.
Consensus risk involves nodes disagreeing on the majority of the working chain because they run different versions of the software. This results in different users seeing different ledgers, often resulting in two or more different networks that are completely non-interoperable.
Finally, process and precedent risk are the vulnerabilities and attack vectors introduced through the formalization of deployment processes and the habits acquired as a result.
Hard forks require complete central coordination. Soft forks are essentially "merciful" 51% attacks. Neither is ideal. Absolutely not. The former isn't even practical to deploy at the moment. According to the original Bitcoin design, the latter was actually an attack on the network. We have successfully pushed past this limit and still deployed things mercifully, but we should never forget that soft forks are actually what Satoshi Nakamoto believed to be a 51% attack on the network and could be used to do Bitcoin Every evil deed designed. Be on guard.
At this point, assuming Satoshi is a benevolent entity, I'm pretty sure Satoshi knows nothing about Types 2 and 3 . But we shouldn't be too harsh on him. None of us do this. After years of experimentation, trial and error, and watching other networks completely screw up, it even began to systematically approach Category 2. And to this day, Category 3 remains a completely unsolved problem and a complete mystery.
I have something to confess. After SegWit was activated, I worked feverishly on solving the Category 3 problem. But it completely failed. completely. Like, it's not even funny. That was a disaster. I became very depressed. This is the main reason why I gave up on Bitcoin development. After these efforts, I came to the conclusion that there was, in fact, no other solution than the creation of an entirely new political system. This was not what I originally signed up to do.
This series of thoughts took me to a darker place. If we truly have the ambition to create a new political paradigm, I’m starting to question whether we ultimately need Bitcoin. After all, Bitcoin is a protest against the current central bank/money printing status quo. Not a solution for building a new country or a new community.
In other words, if we could actually create an entirely new political paradigm from scratch without central banks and money printing presses, maybe we would find A better way to solve the problem of freedom of transactions and without any of the severe limitations inherent to Bitcoin as mentioned above.
Bitcoin is actually a hack to the status quo. While very smart, it's still quite ugly, clunky, difficult to use, and difficult to extend without sacrificing some of its key advantages.
Unfortunately, we grew up in an era when most of the world took central banks and money printing for granted. The world doesn't really offer many legal ways to circumvent this. As a temporary solution around the harsh financial system, Bitcoin has so far been a huge success. But this doesn't really solve the problem fundamentally. At best it gets people thinking, acts as a catalyst for social transformation, and buys us a little extra time to figure out what to do next... once the central bank collapses. So far, no one seems to really understand this.
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