The Ford Model T was invented, the car is here and there’s nothing more to do! Hand crank start motor, rear wheel drive only, wooden wheels, and a transmission based braking system with no wheel brakes. Why would anyone need anything else?
Who might need seat belts? Are wheel-based braking systems right? Automatic ignition engine? Why would people need reinforced steel frames? Bind places? Navigation systems? Shatter-safe glass? Airbags?
The Model T is perfect, it’s the pinnacle of a car and contains all the features anyone could ever need!
This is what Bitcoiners sound like when they argue vehemently and irrationally against any Bitcoin reforms. It is no longer an imaginary state of conservatism, it has become a radical religion. Bitcoin has serious problems to solve, both in terms of operational flaws and shortcomings that jeopardize its chance to succeed as a global financial network.
As for the errors currently in effect, OP_CODESEPARATOR allows the creation of blocks that can take up to thirty minutes for a high-end hardware node to be verified. This is a denial of service attack on network users. A timewarp attack, a way to make the network’s complexity lower than it should be, can be accomplished by miners using timestamps on their blocks. A very small operation can be used to trick SPV wallets into thinking they are an internal node in the block’s merkle tree, allowing a malicious miner to insert a fake transaction inside a nonexistent branch of the block’s merkle tree. they really exist.
These are design flaws that are currently in effect, with an increasing incentive to take advantage of Bitcoin’s all-important growth. Some simply allow a single malicious block to severely degrade network performance, others allow a malicious miner to actively profit. A timewarp attack provides a way to force the entire network and indirectly increase the blocksize by reducing the difficulty and keeping it low to produce blocks at a much faster rate. If there was enough economic support to convince miners to use it, there would be no way out of it without hardforking.
That’s not to mention the major shortcomings in terms of scalability. Bitcoin cannot support even a significant portion of the world’s population in a self-sustaining manner. If Bitcoin were not financially viable, most of the world would be abandoned to the safe and secure means of communicating with Bitcoin.
Lightning is very limited in how many channels can be opened or closed to force things on the chain into a high cost area. The higher the payouts, the more limited this will be. A barrel in an optimistic situation can be one way to deal with this, but in a non-cooperative situation it is even worse. There is also another problem, the only way to create an Ark right now is for every user on the Ark to be online at the same time to pre-sign the tasks required to create an Ark. The more people there are, the more likely someone is offline and it forces a non-cooperative case.
These problems cannot be solved without a fundamental improvement of the Bitcoin protocol itself. Full stop. The limitations of the protocol as it stands now do not give us a tool to solve these problems in a way that is inconsistent with the goal of giving people a trustless way to communicate with their money.
People who argue that Bitcoin is good enough are brain dead cultists. They are no different than an inventor who would argue that the Ford Model T is adequate, and there is nothing we can do to improve upon it.
This article is a Take it. The views expressed are entirely those of the author and do not reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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