In the final chapter of the Internet of Money Antonopoulos provides a surprisingly relaxed account of how Bitcoin will overcome any scaling problems.
In fact he's so relaxed, he uses a tongue-in-cheek analogy with how so many people said the internent wouldn't scale over the last 30 years!
Back in 1989 when the internet was mainly dialup, message boards such as Usenet were very slow. It took between 24 to 48 hours for any message to be uploaded and accessible to everyone, meaning a 2-4 day turnaround for message and response pairs to get around!
There was a discussion at the time about the problem with trends in usage: within a few months some engineers thought there would be so many megabytes of data being uploaded to message boards that it would take 26 hours for a day’s messages to be uploaded, which obviously meant the limit of what they system could handle had been reached given that there are only 24 hours in the day!
This was a problem of scale.
At the time it was the alt groups which were perceived to be the problem (not the academic groups), and alt groups is where the first spam appeared.
Only the bravest service providers carried the usegroups, the ones with the huge 5MB hard drives, and there was concern again with capacity.
However eventually network connections were improved and the system scaled perfectly fine!
Then the same scaling concerns and debates resurfaced when email started to get popular and then again when Web Sites became a thing.
But the internet managed to scale again, and again with cat videos, and again with Netflix
Scale defines the edge of today’s capabilities. As it moves forwards, capability increases.
And today Bitcoin is failing to scale, and if we’re lucky it will continue failing to scale just like the internet!
You can read all of the doomsaying at bitcoinobituaries.com
People have been doomsaying its demise for years, but bitcoin is still here!
When the Bitcoin network is busy it may take days for transactions to clear and users freak out because they think their BTC has left their wallet, but it hasn’t because there is no wallet.
Better wallets which auto adjust the transactions fees are a scaling solution here.
Bitcoin doesn’t transmit, it settles.
There are no illegitimate transactions on BTC, if you pay the fee, the tx is legitimate, not spam, there is no paternalism, BTC is net neutral.
Bitcoin will continue to fail to scale in the same way the internet has done since the late 1980s!
This all seems a bit chillaxed to me, but then again I guess this kind of attitude goes with a genuine commitment to decentralisation, or more accurately trust in decentralised solutions.
Just leave it the marketplace to decide what's valued and what's isn't and everything else will follow...
There will be periods of tight resources, periods when transactions are slow, but eventually solutions will emerge that will help Bitcoin to scale.
Or maybe with the case of Bitcoin, there are now so many other chains, that is scaling: new blockchain techs emerge to do what Bitcoin cannot...
I guess we kind of saw the latest test with ordinals - a new function, a rush of interest and then just a backing down of excitement, maybe the crypto community admitting that NFTs are best left to other chains...?!?
And at the end of the day, BITCOIN is still here, it really is, and the price ain't looking too shabby neither!
