Bitcoin's graceful scalability over decades. Bitcoin scalability problems and options to “solve” it over and over again. Scaling is an engineering issue.
Transcript
[AUDIENCE] I would like to ask you about the scalability of Bitcoin. What options [does] Bitcoin have right now? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each of the options? Which option should [Bitcoin] adopt?
[ANDREAS] That's a very good question. It is also a very easy one to answer: all of them. I did a talk in Prague which has been videotaped- "Videotaped," I'm over 40 [years old]. Ignore that.
-which is being recorded and will be broadcast soon. The entire presentation was about scalability and why scalability is something that doesn't get solved. It just gets pushed further out as we scale to different types of applications. [To answer] the question, what are we going to do?
Are we going to [activate] Segregated Witness? Raise the block size limit? Invertible Bloom lookup tables? Thin blocks?
Replace-by-fee (RBF)? The answer is really simple: all of them. Then we will run into new scalability problems. The moment we create [more] space with these capacity improvements, people will see that and think, "Hey, I can do something now that I couldn't do before!" Then that space will be gone and the story repeats.
The Internet is an example of a technology that failed to scale, gracefully, for twenty-five years. If Bitcoin manages to fail to scale gracefully for decades, we're in a very good place. Yes, we will do all of those things. The debates have narrowed to, which one [will] we do first?
[Will we add] it this month or next month, this year or next year? [This] is really just an engineering issue, and is not worthy of all the drama or recriminations that happen in this space. I'm very confident about scaling. Ultimately, scaling is an engineering issue.
Bitcoin has within it the capability to scale. We see very smart people working in development, inventing new ways of improving scaling all the time. It's not just the five I mentioned, there [are about] twenty proposals on how to scale Bitcoin. Will it scale on its own without another layer?
I don't know. Maybe we have to [make] more layers on top. As long as they are trustless and decentralised, I'm okay with that. It will scale.