Blue Collar Bitcoin (a podcast) on Nostr: Trying to change #Bitcoin's base layer is like a game of Whac-A-Mole — "fixing" one ...
Trying to change #Bitcoin's base layer is like a game of Whac-A-Mole — "fixing" one part often f**ks up another part.
#BTC is, in many regards, a Goldilocks technology.
adam3us (npub1qg8…24kw) explains...👇👇
"There’s something unusual about Bitcoin. So, in 2013 I spent about 4 months of my spare time trying to find any way to appreciably improve Bitcoin, you know across scalability, decentralization, privacy, fungibility, making it easier for people to mine on small devices, a bunch of metrics that I considered to be metrics of improvement. And so I looked at lots of different changing parameters, changing design, changing network, changing cryptography, and you know I came up with lots of different ideas, some of which have been proposed by other people since.
But, basically to my surprise, it seemed that almost anything you did that arguably improved it in one way, made it worse in multiple other ways. It made it more complicated, used more bandwidth, made some other aspect of the system objectively worse.
And so I came to think about it that Bitcoin kind of exists in a narrow pocket of design space. You know, the design space of all possible designs is an enormous search space, right, and counterintuitively it seems you can’t significantly improve it.
And bear in mind I come from a background where I have a PhD in distributed systems, and spent most of my career working on large scale internet systems for startups and big companies, security protocols, and that sort of thing, so I feel like I have a reasonable chance if anybody does of incrementally improving something of this nature. And basically I gave it a shot and concluded, “Wow there is literally, basically nothing. Literally everything you do makes it worse.” Which was not what I was expecting."
#BTC is, in many regards, a Goldilocks technology.
adam3us (npub1qg8…24kw) explains...👇👇
"There’s something unusual about Bitcoin. So, in 2013 I spent about 4 months of my spare time trying to find any way to appreciably improve Bitcoin, you know across scalability, decentralization, privacy, fungibility, making it easier for people to mine on small devices, a bunch of metrics that I considered to be metrics of improvement. And so I looked at lots of different changing parameters, changing design, changing network, changing cryptography, and you know I came up with lots of different ideas, some of which have been proposed by other people since.
But, basically to my surprise, it seemed that almost anything you did that arguably improved it in one way, made it worse in multiple other ways. It made it more complicated, used more bandwidth, made some other aspect of the system objectively worse.
And so I came to think about it that Bitcoin kind of exists in a narrow pocket of design space. You know, the design space of all possible designs is an enormous search space, right, and counterintuitively it seems you can’t significantly improve it.
And bear in mind I come from a background where I have a PhD in distributed systems, and spent most of my career working on large scale internet systems for startups and big companies, security protocols, and that sort of thing, so I feel like I have a reasonable chance if anybody does of incrementally improving something of this nature. And basically I gave it a shot and concluded, “Wow there is literally, basically nothing. Literally everything you do makes it worse.” Which was not what I was expecting."