Inscription: "The Emperor's New Clothes of "Great Blockism".

Original Author: Mindao (X: @mindaoyang)

Editor’s note: Recently, Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr posted on the X platform that the inscription is exploiting a vulnerability in the BTC core client, Bitcoin Core, to send spam messages to the blockchain, and said that the vulnerability will be fixed in Bitcoin Knots V27. His remarks sparked heated discussions in the community for a while, and topics such as developer permissions, BTC block size, and BTC forks also returned to people’s field of vision. Should BTC take the big block route of accelerating technocracy or simply store value?BTC how should the tension between technology and desire be balanced behind the ecological bustle?dForce Founder Mindao (X:@mindaoyang) posted an article expressing his views on this matter, and Odaily Planet Daily sorted it out as follows:

It is of course good to BTC the ecology is lively, but BTC cannot meet all the needs of everyone, and how to balance the tension between technology and desire may be a problem that coin holders, coin speculators, miners, and exchanges need to consider.

Familiar recipes, familiar tastes.

The flames of war were finally ignited.

From 2014 to 2017, the BTC circle fought a large and small block war that lasted for several years, and the Chinese miners, together with the exchange, and the BTC fundamentalists began a life-and-death struggle for the route, and finally the big block was defeated, splitting into BCH and BSV, and the Chinese miners were also labeled as “mining tyrants”.

The small block gang was led by Adam Back and Greg Maxwell, who later formed Blockstream to develop the BTC sidechain Liquid Network. Therefore, there has always been a conspiracy theory in the circle that the Blockstream gang did not hesitate to split the BTC network for the sake of its own sidechain, advocated small blocks, opposed BTC scaling, and brought goods to the Liquid Network.

Conspiracy theories are conspiracy theories, and after so many years, compared to the development of large block fork chains, it is clear that small blockists are prescient.

In 2023, driven by Chinese retail investors and exchanges, a new wave of “big blockism” movement will be launched with inscriptions as the carrier.

The core of the inscription problem is still BTC expansion, and the essence is still the dispute between large and small blocks. The inscription is of course driven by market demand, but after all, BTC is a small cup, and the inscription is a tornado in the cup, and hard squeezing will inevitably lead to the squeeze of normal transactions.

I used to be a big blocker, believing that technology should meet the needs of the greatest number of people, but then I completely reconciled.

BTC is a store of religion and values, which needs to be extremely conservative and unchanged for a hundred years;

ETH Fang is progressivist and needs to be updated and iterated quickly;

We don’t need to choose one or the other, we have our own loves, we like to be lively and innovative, we can go to the ETH to play or the side chain to play, so that BTC can do quiet value storage?

Large and small blocks involve BTC positioning and expansion, which is not only a battle over technical routes, but also a battle for cognition of “what BTC is”.

If BTC take the big block route of accelerating technocracy and meet all the needs of all users, it must be scaled without limit, not just assets such as inscriptions;

In 13-15 years, there were many projects that tried to implement smart contract functionality directly on BTC. In this way, the positioning of the BTC expands into a general smart contract platform and an asset platform. The reality is that even with such a flexible architecture as ETH, it is very difficult to achieve such scaling, and it is technically impossible to achieve it without giving up BTC other core requirements.

Block-based patch-based expansion, taking one step at a time, is presumptuous and opportunistic. As an asset platform, BTC can not BTC be more flexible than ETH, and similarly, as a value asset, you can’t be more aggressive than ETH.

Therefore, it is not BTC dream of not having a sea of stars, but the attempt of the past ten years to find its own greatest common divisor in terms of technology and narrative, and also “solve” the problem of expansion by the way.

How did BTC solve the scaling problem?

The BTC solution is to adjust the narrative and become “digital gold” and non-sovereign currency, under this narrative, scaling has become a false proposition, and the problem of scaling is left to ETH Fang to solve.

Under the narrative of digital gold, TPS and expansion itself have become a “false proposition”. The physical turnover of physical gold accounts for less than 1% of the inventory every year, and BTC as a store of value, there is no need for high-frequency trading on the main chain, so TPS and expansion are not a problem at all.

In fact, ETH Fang solves the problem of capacity expansion, and it is also the same thing, turning the main network into a settlement network (expensive, slow, and stable), so that L2 can truly solve the problem of capacity expansion and TPS.

But the question is, BTC there is no high TPS and on-chain transactions, where will the high fees come from? Without high fees, if the mining is completed BTC in 2140, how can the network security be ensured?

Truth be told, this is indeed the fate of the BTC, and there is no solution to this problem now, but after all, it will only need to be faced in 2140. If the BTC reaches $100 trillion, I believe it will force everyone to form a new token model and consensus to solve the problem of “fees”.

Although the blockists cannot answer the core question of “the end of the block reward and the low fees of low-capacity BTC cannot maintain network security”, the scalability proposition of the large blockism is obviously a direct and devastating blow to the core value of the BTC; Extremely high technical risk, which is a fatal blow to the core positioning of BTC as a digital gold, indestructible security and permanent store of value.

I think that small blockism is logically more self-consistent, leaving the problem of “fees” to the holders of coins in a hundred years, while the negative impact of short-sightedness caused by large blockism and patched scaling is immediate.

As a coin holder, it is of course good to BTC the ecology is lively, but BTC cannot meet all the needs of everyone, and how to balance the tension between technology and desire may be a problem that coin holders, coin speculators, miners, and exchanges need to consider.

Without a stable and unchanging technical underlay, BTC cannot become the ultimate store of value, and high fees are also a short-lived illusion.

The issue of inscriptions is just a minor episode in the battle over the routes of large blocks, small blocks, and perhaps there are technical alternatives that can find the greatest common divisor between the two factions; It would be silly to be able to talk about the number or sit down and talk about the number, and then fork up.

Vitalik is a big blocker, tinkering with colored coins (ancient inscriptions?) on the BTC for 13 years. He has always stood in the big block camp in the big and small block debates. But he knew the limitations of BTC itself, and his arms couldn’t twist his thighs, so he finally went to ETH shop in anger.

You can even think that ETH Fang and the new public chain behind it are, spiritually, a fork of BTC big block.

The victory of conservatism does not mean the defeat of progressivism.

The world is so big, you can always find a way to reconcile with yourself.

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