Let Bitcoin Shine Again
Represented by Ethereum, the Turing-complete smart contract platform, known as "Blockchain 2.0," has made extensive exploration in decentralized applications in recent years and has spawned a rich ecosystem of developers and applications. It is considered an upgrade to "Blockchain 1.0" represented by Bitcoin. However, from the very beginning, the problem of the "Blockchain Trilemma" has deeply constrained the development of the entire industry. After many years of effort by countless scientists and engineers, various technological paths such as block capacity expansion, non-PoW consensus mechanisms, sharding, and side chains have been developed, but none have been successful to date, leading to the failure of large-scale commercialization of blockchain becoming a "mirage."
Although lacking theoretical basis, I personally believe that the "Blockchain Trilemma" is absolutely impossible to break through! Only by breaking free from the constraints of blockchain technology can a highly scalable and secure decentralized network be achieved. In other words, off-chain computing is the feasible means to achieve this goal. Bitcoin's Lightning Network was the first to successfully achieve this path, reaching the goal of theoretically infinite scalability and preliminary large-scale application, but limited to Bitcoin payments.
Bitcoin, as the earliest smart contract platform, has never given up on the pursuit of Turing-complete smart contracts. However, considering security and reliability, this cannot be directly achieved on the Bitcoin blockchain. Therefore, three technological paths have been developed: side chains (such as Rootstock, Stacks, etc.), colored coins (such as Tokenization, Inscription, etc.), and off-chain computing (such as RGB, Taro). Among them, the RGB protocol implements Turing-complete smart contracts across the entire off-chain. When it runs on the Lightning Network, which is also an off-chain protocol, it becomes a smart contract platform with infinite scalability, capable of fully covering all blockchain application scenarios, casting doubt on the necessity of other public chains such as Ethereum. This is a revolutionary innovation, second only to the emergence of Bitcoin. Therefore, the RGB protocol is the most critical and perhaps the only viable technological path for the second layer of Bitcoin in my mind. Of course, there are still many difficulties and obstacles. Due to the technical uniqueness of the RGB protocol, there is currently a serious lack of application developers, and there is a need to build a complete and developer-friendly infrastructure to create a rich application ecosystem. This is one of the goals that today's winners, such as Waterdrop Capital, are working hard to achieve in collaboration with technology teams such as Infinitas and Token Pocket.
After discussing the second layer, let's go back to the Bitcoin chain itself. After successfully overcoming the hard fork crisis in 2017, the main focus of Bitcoin core developers has been on enhancing the anonymity and privacy protection of Bitcoin, marked by the introduction of Schnorr signatures and TapRoot. However, a more important issue is the "Achilles' heel" of Bitcoin, which is the security vulnerability that arises after a significant reduction in miner block rewards in the future. As the fourth halving approaches, this issue has once again garnered public attention. Currently, at least four solutions have been proposed: 1) Increasing the issuance of Bitcoin and surpassing the 21 million limit (but this is unacceptable!); 2) Assuming that the price of Bitcoin will continue to rise or that mining costs will significantly decrease (such as through a power technology revolution), the block rewards will not decrease in relation to mining costs; 3) Luke Dash Jr's proposal to reduce block size; 4) Expanding the block size and significantly increasing miner transaction fees by increasing transaction volume. Personally, I believe that large blocks are the real solution to the problem, as it aligns with Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision and the concerns about centralization will be completely eliminated with the improvement of storage and network capacities in the coming decades. Additionally, the widespread application of the Lightning Network and the RGB protocol will inevitably push Bitcoin to implement block expansion.
If one day in the future, my envisioned scenarios become a reality, then Bitcoin will not only serve as the founder, pioneer, and leader of the blockchain industry but also become the industry's terminator. Just as the Internet eventually converged into a single network, blockchain has achieved the convergence of thousands of chains, returning to Satoshi Nakamoto's vision. This is the glory of Satoshi Nakamoto, the glory of Bitcoin holders, and the glory of the entire blockchain industry.
Finally, let us call out: Let Bitcoin be glorious once again!
