Bitcoin Blockspace is a Scarce Resource & Protocol Developers are Scientific Innovators
Late economist Julian Simon, in “The Ultimate Resource 2” talks about finite resources, scarcity & how humans solve problems.
He gives us 2 important lessons that we can apply to Bitcoin scaling & blocksize.
Malthusian Theory suggests that uncapped population growth will outstrip finite resources (food, minerals, land).
Neo-Malthusians advocate for eugencis to control population.
(Re: Bitcoin think people = transactions, resources = blockspace & eugenics = 1MB cap.)
Simon explains that more people = more wealth = increased demand for resources = equals higher prices for scarce resources.
Higher prices is an opportunity – but for who? He shows that higher prices provide greater opportunities for corporations to profit & for scientists to make discoveries.
Humanity is always better off when a solution is found for a problem, than if the problematic had never existed.
Translating this into the world of Bitcoin, if you see high fees as a problem, then increasing the blocksize is the equivalent of corporations seizing the opportunity to profit.
Optimizing the blockspace is equated to scientists making discoveries & solving problems for humanity.
In Ultimate Resource 2, Simon provides data to show that with human creativity & ingenuity, scarce resources can be made abundant to create a prosperous future.
In early 2018, shortly after the big block corporations split away from Bitcoin to focus on raising block limit, the engineers & cryptographers in Bitcoin confronted with scarcity (1MB cap) resulted in a 2.1 MB block.
The world’s most accomplished cryptographers & protocol developers are working on Bitcoin, using the most abundant resource, human creativity, to create the most valuable scarce resource, blockspace.
The developers on the BTC side are working with constraints at the protocol level to innovate on compression & propagation technology, that feels more interesting to me.
When humans are faced with a problem, typically we innovate out way out of it. Raising blocksize feels like the lazy way out — and that’s probably the number 1 reason that world class protocol developers are mostly working on Bitcoin not BCH or altcoins.
Published at Mon, 16 Sep 2019 00:33:32 +0000
Bitcoin Pic Of The Moment
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By trendingtopics on 2019-03-27 19:05:24
