Bitcoin’s slowness is a feature, not a bug

The following is a guest post from Brendon Sedo, Initial Contributor at Core DAO.

Satoshi didn’t invent Bitcoin to be a generalist network — a jack of all trades, master of none. Bitcoin deliberately trades speed and scalability for decentralization and security. But contrary to popular myths, this isn’t an obstacle to building new Bitcoin-based applications. 

Slowness is Bitcoin’s strength, not its weakness. And the ‘Building on Bitcoin’ movement will succeed only if devs embrace, inherit Bitcoin’s slow architecture while strategically working ‘around the edges.’ 

Don’t Try to Change Bitcoin

Bitcoin’s slowness is crucial to its security model and transaction confirmation mechanism.

Instead of relying on centralized intermediaries, Bitcoin achieves trustless transaction finality through Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus, prioritizing security over speed. The resource-intensive and time-consuming PoW provides a computational guarantee to prevent malicious actors from altering Bitcoin’s transaction history. 

The 10-minute block confirmation time is thus one of Bitcoin’s core security features, albeit among the most fundamental ones.  

A shorter block time would increase the chances of orphaned blocks and forks. Whereas slower blocks ensure transactions are propagated across miners to confirm and agree on the longest chain. This negates the chances of validating wrong transactions and hard forks.

Yet Bitcoin’s scalability has always been a point of contention. So, devs have tried improving Bitcoin’s throughput and making it cheaper during high network congestion.

One such proposal was increasing the block size to reduce transaction fees while allowing for more data storage within a block. The community fought back, with good reason, and it led to the so-called Blocksize War. 

While larger Bitcoin blocks could have processed more transactions per second (TPS), making the chain faster and more scalable. It severely affects decentralization and network security. 

Larger blocks require more compute, so  it’s more expensive to run full nodes. This in turn means fewer miners securing the network, increasing centralization and consolidation risks in the hands of a wealthy elite. That’s precisely what Bitcoin was built to solve. 

The lesson: you don’t change Bitcoin; Bitcoin changes you. 

Higher TPS isn’t the right way to scale Bitcoin. In fact, Bitcoin’s core doesn’t need to scale at all. Past attempts have failed, and future attempts should too. 

Does that mean Bitcoin is just waiting there to become obsolete as a foundational network for crypto innovations? Not at all. 

Devs must stop trying to build directly on Bitcoin. Rather, they should leverage the network’s slowness-induced security and resilience and take a layered approach to building on Bitcoin. 

Bitcoin was, is, and will be the slow, secure core to the otherwise fleeting and risky world of crypto. 

Harness Slowness, Build ‘Around the Edges’

Bitcoin wasn’t designed for high programmability, complex smart contracts, high-throughput applications, and other such flashy concepts. 

It’s purpose is to provide a trust-minimized, censorship-resistant, and immutable foundation for sound money and secure financial transactions. Still Bitcoin can support programmable applications very well.  

The ‘Building on Bitcoin’ movement shows it’s possible to expand Bitcoin’s capabilities while preserving its security and decentralization.

Upgrades like Taproot have refined Bitcoin’s functionality, and enhancements like covenants and bridges will continue to do so in the future. 

However, the most transformative developments will happen beyond the base layer.

Bitcoin-powered innovations will happen at the edges, with scaling solutions like Layer-2s, Sidechains, Statechains, Rollups, and a range of interoperability protocols.

By building ‘around the edges,’ Bitcoin devs can achieve cutting-edge innovations and grow the ecosystem without compromising its core principles. These solutions will unlock entirely new use cases for the network and the asset class. 

This will simultaneously make Bitcoin more usable as a medium of exchange and collateral asset while maintaining Bitcoin’s integrity as the most secure financial network.

While other chains add features to compete for market share, Bitcoin has undergone rigorous scrutiny for any upgrade. The community has withheld hasty decisions to make the network faster so as not to compromise its unparalleled security.

Bitcoin’s slowness is the reason this network will endure. It forces devs to think of long-term solutions that reinforce rather than weaken the foundation. 

Devs mustn’t be psyops into chasing fleeting trends or making reckless compromises. Why should they when they have such a solid, secure, and resilient foundation to build on? 

Just like you don’t dig up a building’s basement to build a third floor above, you can build great things on Bitcoin without changing or hampering its core. That’s the way towards truly decentralized financial systems. 

Durable is what lasts. Bitcoin is durable, and apps built on this ecosystem can be, too. It’s not a question of if but whether developers are ready to adopt the right approach. Those who do will dominate the next decade of Bitcoin innovations. It has begun. 

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