Author: Shinobi, Bitcoin Magazine; Compiled by: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance

Over the past few years, the public discussion about scaling has been poisoned and captured by an extremely toxic and defeatist attitude: "Why bother?"< /p>

"Why bother trying to scale up? Basic napkin math shows that no matter what we do, it's impossible to get everyone to self-police."

"Why bother? Trying hard to expand the scale What about mods? People are stupid and lazy anyway, and even if we did, people would just use custodians."

"Why bother trying to scale I have mine? , I will become rich enough to keep it myself, who will care about those stupid and lazy common people?"

As time goes by, this attitude increasingly permeates the entire space, according to There are tons of different rationalizations and justifications for who you talk to. This is a completely defeatist, dystopian and pessimistic future. I say this as someone who is extremely pessimistic about the vast amount of problems I see in this ecosystem.

Convincing yourself that you have failed is one of the fastest ways to fail. As a distributed system, Bitcoin relies on sufficient decentralization and enough independent system participants to resist the coercive or malicious influence of larger participants. This is crucial for it to continue to function as a decentralized and censorship-resistant system. If it fails to remain sufficiently distributed, the natural tendency in the network may be to attract larger, denser groups of participants until they effectively have enormous control over the entire network.

This may ultimately mean the end of Bitcoin’s most important attribute: censorship.

It’s incredible to me that even though our situation is not perfect, we have made tremendous progress in the past decade. Ten years ago, there was a clamor for increasing block sizes. Now we have Lightning Network, Statechains, and now Ark. We have people using BitVM trying out a much improved co-hosting model. If some new cryptographic hypothesis succeeds and is proven to be implementable in a usable way, we may even have a vague idea of ​​a way to implement the contract without the need for a soft fork.

Even if we eventually hit a ceiling we can’t escape, every bit of good reason we get means more room for self-policing. This means more room for more custodians, allowing for more small-scale custodians to have people they can trust more than siled companies, as a larger group gives the custodian a larger competitive pressure. In order to maintain a broad dispersion of entities that interact directly with the network, its decentralization needs to be maintained.

Why are so many Bitcoin enthusiasts willing to throw up their hands and succumb to defeatist sentiment? Yes, we have more problems to solve than we did ten years ago, but in those ten years we were expanding scalabilityThere have also been huge advances in sex. This is not a binary situation, this is not a win-lose game with no middle ground. Every improvement we make to scalability gives Bitcoin a higher chance of success. It further solidifies and defends Bitcoin’s censorship.

I’m not saying that people should naively believe every promised solution or hype, there are indeed some issues and limitations that we should be aware of. But that doesn’t mean throwing in the towel and giving up early. There's huge potential here to truly reshape the world in a meaningful way, but it won't happen overnight. If everyone gave up and relaxed their expectations of getting rich and apathetically stopped caring about it, this simply wouldn't happen.

Both pessimism and optimism are poison, and it’s time to start finding a balance between the two instead of taking your drug of choice and falling into delusion.