What do you think about the argument that Bitcoin is essentially a tradeoff between either secure transactions or cheap transactions? Because eventually, the block rewards will run out and no more bitcoins will be generated, so bitcoin ecosystem will function only thanks to the reward to miners that will be coming from transaction fees.
First of all, that doesn’t happen for a 142 years. As far as I know, in a 132 years, we will be looking at a Bitcoin as an interplanetary network. I am less worried about how we optimize the blockchain today to achieve that.
A lot of this is a matter of optimization and quite honestly, I won’t be started getting worried about a problem, until we start seeing signs of that problem, or even tiny tiny examples of that problem.
Part of my experience comes from reading concern journalism – I will call it that to avoid calling it concern trolling.
The idea here is that when I was working on the internet for example, every year without fail there would be an article that said: “Ethernet has reached the limits of physical science and physics, and here is proof why Ethernet cannot exceed one megabit.” The next year, it was, “Here is proof: Ethernet cannot exceed ten megabits.”
A year later, it was everything the same, just for gigabit. Year after that, it was ten gigabits. Every single year there was an “Ethernet is about to die” article that was published.
We have seen that with IP: “IP won’t/can’t possibly scale, we are running out of IP addresses and the whole internet will collapse.”
“Search won’t/can’t possibly scale and we will run out of the ability to index everything and search will collapse.”
For storage is same… All of these doom scenarios, they assume the technology is static, they also assume that even when you have something of value, there won’t be someone to innovate and solve the problem.
In all of these problems, what I see is opportunity.
In 1995, almost every article about the internet said that it would fail because you couldn’t find anything. Some people who saw that as a problem, pulled their hair out and cried that the internet would die. Then a couple of guys formed Google and decided to solve that problem properly. Now they are worth $1.2 trillion alone.
So you can either look at it as a problem and never change anything, or you can consider “what kind of value can I generate in this industry if I solve this?” If you are not a builder, look out for those who are and support them, at least that is not a problem in era of cryptocurrencies.
So far, I have not seen any technical problems in Bitcoin that are unsolvable. These problems are technical, but they are solvable, and the concerns are mostly academic. And the network is incredibly dynamic and resilient.
In summary, I am not worried about optimization. I am not worried about scaling. For every one of these problems, I have seen ten different proposed solutions, which could take effect long before these problems would become actually real.
Bitcoin will continue to scale, grow, and adapt to these challenges without much difficulty.
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