BoBo the Bitcoiner 257: Bitcoin's slowness is a feature, not a bug

Satoshi didn’t invent BTC to be a generalist network, a jack of all trades, master of none. BTC deliberately trades speed & scalability for decentralization & security. Contrary to myths, this isn’t an obstacle to building new BTC-based applications.
Slowness is BTC’s strength, not its weakness. And the ‘Building on BTC’ movement will succeed only if devs embrace, inherit BTC’s slow architecture while strategically working ‘around the edges.’
BTC’s slowness is a necessity because of its careful digital clarification and verification instead of depending on human. Instead of relying on centralized intermediaries, BTC achieves trustless transaction finality through Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus, prioritizing security over speed. The resource-intensive & time-consuming PoW provides a computational guarantee to prevent malicious actors from altering BTC’s transaction history.
The 10-minute block confirmation time is thus one of BTC’s core security features, albeit among the most fundamental ones.
Slower blocks ensure transactions are propagated across miners to confirm & agree on the longest chain. This negates the chances of validating wrong transactions.
Yet BTC’s scalability has always been a point of contention. So, devs have tried improving BTC’s throughput & making it cheaper during high network congestion.
A simple solution would be increasing the block size to reduce transaction fees while allowing for more data storage within a block. The community fought back, with good reason,.
While larger BTC blocks could have processed more transactions per second (TPS), making the chain faster & more scalable. But it would severely affects decentralization & 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 & consolidation risks in the hands of a wealthy elite. That’s precisely what BTC was built to solve.
Higher TPS isn’t the right way to scale BTC. In fact, BTC core doesn’t need to scale at all. Past attempts have failed, & future attempts should too.
Does that mean BTC 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 BTC. Rather, they should leverage the network’s slowness-induced security & resilience and take a layered approach to building on BTC.
BTC was, is, & will be the slow, secure core to the otherwise fleeting & risky world of crypto.
BTC wasn’t designed for high programmability, complex smart contracts, high-throughput applications, & other such flashy concepts.
It’s purpose is to provide a trust-minimized, censorship-resistant, & immutable foundation for sound money & secure financial transactions. Still BTC can support programmable applications very well.
The ‘Building on BTC movement shows it’s possible to expand BTC’s capabilities while preserving its security & decentralization.
Upgrades like Taproot have refined BTC’s functionality, & enhancements like covenants & bridges will continue to do so in the future.
However, the most transformative developments will happen beyond the base layer.
BTC-powered innovations will happen at the edges, with scaling solutions like Layer-2s, Sidechains, Statechains, Rollups, & a range of interoperability protocols.
By building ‘around the edges,’ BTC 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 & the asset class.
This will simultaneously make BTC more usable as a medium of exchange and collateral asset while maintaining BTC’s integrity as the most secure financial network.
While other chains add features to compete for market share, BTC 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.
BTC’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, & 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 BTC without changing or hampering its core. That’s the way towards truly decentralized financial systems.
BTC is durable, & 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 BTC innovations. It has begun.

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