One of the most prolific contributors to Bitcoin's development has warned that the major blockchain networks are heading down a dark path toward global regulation.
Matt Collaro wrote in a blog post on Saturday that Bitcoin's long-standing mission as a private, scalable, trustless financial tool is now in question, and that years of hard work have failed to realize that vision in any practical sense. No, he said.
“Sadly, all ideas to make Bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) actually useful for transactions tend to involve untrusted parties in the flow of funds,” Corallo wrote. There is. “We just haven’t been able to break through building cryptocurrency payment rails without the involvement of (untrusted!) parties.”
The end result, he predicts, will be a world where government authorities are successful in restricting or controlling cryptocurrencies towards their own ends, captured by regulators.
“I'm not saying these things aren't good or don't provide scalability; in many cases they do,” Corallo said. Decryption“But they often rely on centralized types of intermediaries.”
Bitcoin scaling technologies in use today, such as sidechains like Liquid and Rootstock, enable faster and cheaper payments, but users also need to trust companies and federations to not steal their funds. . The more popular Lightning network, on the other hand, has a notoriously poor user experience, requiring administrators and Lightning service providers (LSPs) to build front-ends for practical use, Corallo said. I'm adding.
Corallo's criticism also extends to rollups, a new form of Bitcoin scaling technology that takes inspiration from other blockchains. In fact, developers believe that trustless scaling remains elusive for cryptocurrencies overall, as even more programmable blockchains like Ethereum have failed to crack the code.
“The point to emphasize that this is not unique to Bitcoin, but across cryptocurrencies, is that this cannot be solved by some soft fork to increase expressiveness,” Corallo said. Decryption. “This is not a judgment on whether you should or shouldn't do a particular soft fork to increase expressiveness, but pointing this out is largely an irrelevant issue.”
Obstacles in these areas have led to tangible changes in how users perceive Bitcoin. Corallo wrote that many new participants are “only interested in the 21 million coin limit and view any form of non-KYC payment rails as hostile to investment value.”
Over the past year, some of Bitcoin's most enthusiastic institutional investors have completely rejected the role of Bitcoin assets as a medium of exchange.
Paypal co-founder and Lightspark CEO David Marcus said in September that BTC is “not a currency that people use to buy things,” and that fiat currency on the Lightning network will be the payment method for the masses. I argued that it would be.
Earlier this year, MicroStrategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor praised Bitcoin's role as a store of value, but called its role as a currency “controversial” and “distracting” with regulators. called.
In fact, the US government recently arrested the developer of Samourai Wallet, a Bitcoin wallet designed to facilitate private money transfers via CoinJoin transactions.
Samourai's software did not manage users' funds, but required a centralized server to coordinate the mix of trades, making it a single point of failure for regulators.
The crackdown prompted a “final warning” from famed US government whistleblower Edward Snowden and urged developers to implement protocol-level privacy changes to Bitcoin.
According to Corallo, the crypto industry has already wasted opportunities to legally protect non-custodial crypto intermediaries and is instead focusing on securities law reform.
To make matters worse, the current state of centralization of mining pools has made even Bitcoin's foundational layer ” ripe for regulatory capture.”
“Given Bitcoin's current state of affairs, it's hard not to see a bleak vision for the future,” the developer concluded. “If Bitcoiners want to preserve what we have built and fight for it, we must radically improve default wallet privacy across the ecosystem, aggressively invest in regulatory changes, and scalability solutions around the world. We need to focus on operations.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
