A counterargument against the push for greater scalability with Bitcoin is that “most people aren’t going to self-secure anyway, so why bother?”
This is an extremely presumptuous, arrogant and absolutely fallacious argument. It’s the same kind of logical fallacy that humans can’t help but make. The current state of the present is an indicator of what the state of the future will be.
“It doesn’t rain today, so it won’t rain tomorrow.” It’s exactly the type of thinking that led Bitcoiners during the last market cycle to assume that we would peak at $100-200k at that time. This hypothesis was brutally destroyed by a double top at 69 thousand, just 3.5 times compared to the previous all-time high.
The very nature of the digital age we live in and the many radical transformations we have all seen in short periods of time during our lifetimes should shake people out of the belief that the present is a demonstration of the nature of the future, but for many people it does not that’s how it is.
First of all, many people currently do not store their coins themselves they don’t even understand the distinction between self-custody and their coins deposited on Coinbase. For many unsophisticated users, they are just apps that contain bitcoin. I’ve encountered this misunderstanding more times than I can count in my time spent in this space interacting with new users. These users have not yet even been made aware of this possibility, discounting them is simply absurd and presumptuous.
Second, users who choose not to self-guard at this time generally do not do so out of fear of losing their keys. It is not a fear of “responsibility”. This is the fear that they will not be able to adequately manage redundancy in key management and will lose everything they have invested due to incompetence, legitimate errors or freak accidents.
This isn’t 2013 anymore. People no longer backup individual private keys to a digital file. Key management schemes have come a long way since then. Mnemonic seeds, multi-signature wallets, etc. There are also basic deposits that use pre-signed transactions, although they are not widely used. There are tools to make self-custody available in order to offer protection and help in case of errors and in the need to recover coins that have lost the keys.
It exists without chains. Home exists. The Nunchuck exists. Bitkey exists. All of these tools will become even better as time goes on. Embracing Schnorr and Taproot, these easy-to-recover self-custody schemes can blind third-party servers so that during signing and normal use these services don’t even learn anything about the coins held by users or the transactions they co-sign. Taproot allows wallets to delegate disaster recovery keys to friends or family without them knowing anything about those coins unless they are needed.
Self-care tools are advancing, and people’s attitudes toward self-care will change along with these huge technological advances. Downplaying the need for scalability because people have reasons not to right now is pure arrogance.
It’s nothing more than the “I have mine, so fuck everyone else” attitude. Just because the current state of the world is a certain way doesn’t guarantee that it will be that way in the future. Only the arrogant believe this.
This article is a Take. The opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.