These are the kinds of obstacles I see for bitcoin in the next 10 years:
* Scaling
* There are various bottlenecks to increasing bitcoin's blocksize, and a number of ideas for how to loosen those bottlenecks.
* Layer 2 networks like lightning will continue to be developed and gain adoption.
* Education and Tooling
* Coin storage education - How will most people store their coins? How will your grandma store her bitcoin? How do we teach people what is a safe way to store their bitcoin and what is not? This includes procedures for how to create and use bitcoin wallets, improved tools and services for key storage and recovery, and education around the risks of various solutions that are out there. Perhaps the community should embrace and collaborate on some wallet guides to educate people.
* Collaborative custody tools and services. Companies like Unchained Capital and Casa are working on this kind of thing, but standards are needed and the complexity needs to come down a lot and the accessibility needs to come up.
* Wallet vaults can massively improve the security and ease of use of cold wallets. However covenants are needed, which will require one or more new Script opcodes (eg these ones).
* Governance
* The Bitcoin community will likely continue have debates about how to make changes to the protocol and hopefully we can converege on a sustainable mechanism that is used for more than one or two updates before being discarded (like previous methods).
* Political and legal challenges
* As adoption reaches significant levels, its likely there will be a lot more tension in some countries around Bitcion. Some countries will embrace it, some will try to reject it by proposing and/or passing various laws.
* Existing laws that make bitcoin hard to use (legally) in some countries will hopefully be reformed (eg the tax implications of every-day-sized transactions in the US).
* Mining - The amount of electricity and capital eaten up by bitcoin mining will only rise further in the next 10 years while the price is still rising faster than the coinbase reward halvings are reducing the mining rewards. The drama here will only increase, as will the pressure from people who want Bitcoin to adopt a proof of state consensus mechanism. The challenge here is doing the right thing and not caving to pressure and rushing out half-baked solutions. Perhaps the community will eventually decide a PoS consensus protocol is safe and beneficial, but we shouldn't rush to make that decision based on pressure from virtue signalers.
Topic: What are the technical obstacles that Bitcoin has to overcome in the next decade - page 2. (Read 473 times)
July 15, 2021, 03:35:34 PM
July 15, 2021, 05:04:04 AM
What do you think will be the biggest technical obstacles faced in the next decade?
Obviously it's scaling bitcoin for mass/global adaption. Based on network, there are 3, which are on-chain (Bitcoin), side-chain (such as Liquid and RSK) and off-chain/2nd-layer (such as LN). For on-chain scaling, it's mainly about reducing transaction size, transaction batching and faster verification.
1. Taproot already locked-in and it's just matter of time before it's activated. However, Taproot only has noticeable impact with complex script and multiple keys/signature.
2. Using more efficient transaction serialization to reduce transaction size. See Did you know bitcoin uses 6 different ways to represent integers.
3. Mimble Wimble which perform transaction batching and improve privacy. But AFAIK it's difficult to implement Mimble Wimble without sacrifice it's privacy property.
One is to increase the block size, but without an improved scripting system that can parse these kinds of complex conditions, you'll just end up making the blockchain too big for most people to download fairly quickly.
And increase block size also involve social (and even politic) problem.
July 14, 2021, 01:21:02 PM
You probably mean "obstacles to be tackled within the next decade" 
Well, we clearly need to standardize how our Layer-2 transactions system works (lightning network), since at the rate the price is going in the long term, fees will be too high in USD value for smaller transactions. Eltoo is a nice step towards that direction but it's clear that standardization won't happen with a bunch of completing LN clients being maintained, the only way I can see a set of LN internals being cemented for good is if they're merged into Bitcoin Core itself. Not the protocol, just the client.
To do that we need to invent a way to make scripts with complex rules, what you folks call "smart contracts". Bitcoin Script is too simple to make something like this, as I wrote about in another post.
Normally you'd think about using a general-purpose language such as e.g. Lisp (or even C, but I think that's too big) and then your scripting engine evaluates the commands to do algorithms that you would otherwise be able to do in "grownup" programming languages.
For an example of the above, there is a need for a method to make two parties "bind", or agree, to a particular transaction that one will send to another, and not to send other transactions that haven't been agreed upon. This logic would be too large to fit in a Bitcoin transaction at a reasonable size, and too complex to do in Bitcoin Script anyway. So it will need its own protocol and network of nodes that specifically understand, and speak, this logic. And what can already be done today, is broadcasting the final state to bitcoin's blockchain (and a "sentinel" initial state that proves there's an L2 contract in place). This is the basics of how LN channels work.
The challenge is that the scripts must not be too large or they won't fit inside blocks and/or will cause transactions to be too big to include many of them in a block at the same time, which will congest the network. However, this is usually what happens when you're using such languages (unless you choose one that can be translated to "bytecode" similar to the one Bitcoin Script reads, e.g. something like Java but way smaller).
There are two solutions to this problem. One is to increase the block size, but without an improved scripting system that can parse these kinds of complex conditions, you'll just end up making the blockchain too big for most people to download fairly quickly.
The other solution is to somehow offload this logic to another protocol, and just broadcast a final result, and proof that there's a contract happening, like in the above example. And this is what devs are currently trying to do.
Now after all that is done, there's the additional problem of getting most people to use LN. User adoption is fairly slow and cannot be sped up, and obviously, not everyone is going to use LN. Even today some exchanges and users are still using legacy addresses. So naturally, LN will be subject to this adoption rate as well. This is where exchanges supporting LN and mass media promotion of LN will be useful.
Well, we clearly need to standardize how our Layer-2 transactions system works (lightning network), since at the rate the price is going in the long term, fees will be too high in USD value for smaller transactions. Eltoo is a nice step towards that direction but it's clear that standardization won't happen with a bunch of completing LN clients being maintained, the only way I can see a set of LN internals being cemented for good is if they're merged into Bitcoin Core itself. Not the protocol, just the client.
To do that we need to invent a way to make scripts with complex rules, what you folks call "smart contracts". Bitcoin Script is too simple to make something like this, as I wrote about in another post.
Normally you'd think about using a general-purpose language such as e.g. Lisp (or even C, but I think that's too big) and then your scripting engine evaluates the commands to do algorithms that you would otherwise be able to do in "grownup" programming languages.
For an example of the above, there is a need for a method to make two parties "bind", or agree, to a particular transaction that one will send to another, and not to send other transactions that haven't been agreed upon. This logic would be too large to fit in a Bitcoin transaction at a reasonable size, and too complex to do in Bitcoin Script anyway. So it will need its own protocol and network of nodes that specifically understand, and speak, this logic. And what can already be done today, is broadcasting the final state to bitcoin's blockchain (and a "sentinel" initial state that proves there's an L2 contract in place). This is the basics of how LN channels work.
The challenge is that the scripts must not be too large or they won't fit inside blocks and/or will cause transactions to be too big to include many of them in a block at the same time, which will congest the network. However, this is usually what happens when you're using such languages (unless you choose one that can be translated to "bytecode" similar to the one Bitcoin Script reads, e.g. something like Java but way smaller).
There are two solutions to this problem. One is to increase the block size, but without an improved scripting system that can parse these kinds of complex conditions, you'll just end up making the blockchain too big for most people to download fairly quickly.
The other solution is to somehow offload this logic to another protocol, and just broadcast a final result, and proof that there's a contract happening, like in the above example. And this is what devs are currently trying to do.
Now after all that is done, there's the additional problem of getting most people to use LN. User adoption is fairly slow and cannot be sped up, and obviously, not everyone is going to use LN. Even today some exchanges and users are still using legacy addresses. So naturally, LN will be subject to this adoption rate as well. This is where exchanges supporting LN and mass media promotion of LN will be useful.
July 14, 2021, 11:41:19 AM
I have been studying Computer Science at College which has taken over my life for the last two years. I have been tasked with a essay that will be the last one I have to write which I am allowed to pick any subject and I have picked Bitcoin. I thought that an interesting topic would be the obstacles that Bitcoin has overcome which I have mostly written and then I thought adding some of the obstacles that Bitcoin has yet to face and might take the collective minds to figure out.
What do you think will be the biggest technical obstacles faced in the next decade?
What do you think will be the biggest technical obstacles faced in the next decade?
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