A recent paper claiming that Bitcoin’s scalability issues would hinder its adoption in the future has been strongly criticized by a team of researchers from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank.
The researchers argue that the conclusions reached in the original paper, titled “Bitcoin’s Limited Adoption Problem,” are based on flawed assumptions about the nature of Bitcoin.
The first assumption challenged by the Bitcoin Policy Institute researchers is that payments on the Bitcoin network necessitate full network consensus for settlement.
They assert that this claim is inaccurate and fails to consider the mechanisms by which Bitcoin achieves consensus.
The second assumption disputed by the researchers is the idea that the addition of miners to the network slows down settlement times by delaying network consensus.
The institute researchers argue that this notion ignores the actual impact of miners on the timing of new transaction blocks and overlooks existing scaling solutions that have been widely implemented.
The third assumption rejected by the think tank is the assertion that there is an upper limit on Bitcoin payments due to the architecture of its blockchain.
The researchers argue that this claim fails to consider the scalability achieved through off-chain payments, which do not require consensus from the entire network and therefore provide greater scalability.
In their published paper titled “Bitcoin works in practice, but does it work in theory?,” the Bitcoin Policy Institute researchers from various reputable U.S. universities challenge the theoretical foundation of the “limited adoption problem.”
They emphasize that this problem is not reflective of how Bitcoin actually operates and criticize the original authors for their faulty understanding of the Bitcoin protocol.
While the institute’s research acknowledges that Bitcoin’s blockchain does face challenges in scaling for on-chain payments, they highlight that these issues have been recognized since Bitcoin’s inception and have been addressed through off-chain protocols.
They argue that Bitcoin scales through off-chain payments rather than increasing throughput at the base layer.
The researchers from the Bitcoin Policy Institute dismiss the original paper’s conclusions as misguided, highlighting that Bitcoin’s scalability concerns have been effectively managed over time.
They assert that the authors of the criticized paper have focused on theoretical obstacles that do not align with the practical realities of Bitcoin’s operation.
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