The Ford Model T has been invented, the car has arrived and nothing else needs to be done! A hand crank starter motor, rear wheel drive only, wooden wheels and a transmission based braking system without wheel brakes. Why would anyone need anything else?
Who needs seat belts? Good wheel-based braking systems? An automatic ignition engine? Why would people need reinforced steel frames? Buckle zones? Navigation systems? Unbreakable glass? Airbags?
The Model T is perfect, it is the pinnacle of the car and has all the features anyone would ever need!
This is what Bitcoiners sound like when they argue vehemently and irrationally against all changes in Bitcoin. It is no longer a reasoned position of conservatism, it is pure dogmatic cultism. Bitcoin has very serious issues to address, both in terms of active shortcomings and shortcomings that threaten its chances of success as a global monetary network.
As for current active faults, OP_CODESEPARATOR allows for block construction, which can take up to thirty minutes to validate a node on high-end consumer hardware. This is a denial-of-service attack vector on network users. The timewarp attack, a method of artificially setting the network difficulty lower than it should be, can be performed by miners who manipulate timestamps in their blocks. A particularly small transaction can be used to trick SPV wallets into thinking it is an internal node in a block’s merkle tree, allowing a malicious miner to include completely bogus transactions in a non-existent branch of the block’s merkle tree the block that doesn’t. actually exist.
These are currently active design flaws, with increasing incentive to take advantage of Bitcoin’s more valuable growth. Some allow just a single malicious block to drastically degrade network performance, while others allow the malicious miner to actively take advantage. The timewarp attack provides a way to force the entire network together with an indirect attack increase block size by lowering the difficulty and keeping it low so that blocks can be produced much faster. If enough of the economy supported it to convince miners to enforce it, there would be no way to abandon it other than hard forking.
Not to mention the massive scalability shortcomings. Bitcoin is simply not capable of supporting even a significant portion of the world’s population in a self-protective manner. If Bitcoin were to increase in value financially, most of the world would be relegated to secure and trusted ways to interact with Bitcoin.
Lightning is very limited in the number of channels that can be opened or closed to enforce on-chain business in a high-cost environment. The higher the compensation, the more limited it will become in this regard. In the optimistic case Ark can be another way to deal with this, but in the non-cooperative case it becomes even worse. There’s also another problem: the only way to do Ark right now is to require every user in an Ark to all be online at the same time and pre-sign the necessary transactions to create an Ark. The more people, the more likely someone is not online and forcing a non-cooperative case.
These problems cannot be solved without fundamental improvements to the Bitcoin protocol itself. Point. The limitations of the protocol as it stands today do not give us the toolkit to properly address these shortcomings in a way that does not detract from the goal of giving people a reliable form of interaction with their money.
People who claim Bitcoin is good enough are brain-dead cultists. They are no different than the hypothetical person who would argue that the Ford Model T is adequate, and there is nothing we can do to improve it.
This article is a To take. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.