Gavin (Super Bitcoin / BEVM)
November 3, 2024
TL;DR
This article discusses how Bitcoin’s emphasis on CPU-based mining in Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision has become obsolete due to the evolution of mining practices and the rise of mining pools. It criticizes the cryptocurrency industry for falling into some of the ideas set by Vitalik Buterin (the “VB Trap”), especially the ideas about Proof of Stake (PoS) and sharding, which have led to unsustainable growth patterns and distraction from core issues. The article points out that even a strong PoS system like ETH cannot achieve self-sustaining growth because there are limited assets that can be staked. The article emphasizes the importance of historical context in understanding and future-oriented continuous innovation practices in the crypto space.
Today, I was reading the Bitcoin white paper at Satoshi Nakamoto University and saw that Satoshi Nakamoto described using CPU computing competition to maintain a timestamp system. At this time, Satoshi Nakamoto was wrong: due to the limitations of the times and insufficient context, he wrote about the fair CPU computing competition in the white paper. There are at least two points that conflict with the current context:
The computing power for mining BTC is basically not the CPU;
It is not a peer-to-peer CPU competition mining, but a vertical computing power model of centralized proxy of mining pools.
The reason why Nakamoto didn’t understand is that there was no follow-up. If the current Satoshi Nakamoto were still alive, he would definitely make more revisions to the previous white paper.
At this time, I thought again, why did the entire crypto industry and startup circle fall into @VitalikButerin's cryptocurrency financial trap? Because the entire industry stayed in some directions set by VB since 2014, such as switching to PoS and Sharding, so a large number of PoS chains and Layer2 appeared in the entire industry. Once it was implemented, everyone understood it, and everyone felt that many things were falsified. For example:
The current PoS, even one as strong as ETH’s, cannot achieve self-growth.
Because ETH's PoS maintains network security by staking ETH, and the amount of ETH that can be staked to maintain network security is limited, this logic cannot create a sustainable, self-growing, adaptive consensus system. In other words: prices cannot keep rising.
At present, all state calculations and changes of ETH and ETH Layer2 are performed on the global state tree on the L1 chain.
Sharding based on a global state tree where all state calculations/changes are done on L1 is basically a dead end, and the Layer2 approach will only distract the attention of the entire chain. The core of the problem is not the Layer2 technology, but the ETH network itself: the global state calculation and Account Nonce++ model itself limit sharding. Gavin Wood's Polkadot has done the best job in solving the problem of ETH sharding. Because Gavin Wood and VB entered the crypto circle at the same time, he would not fall into the VB trap completely, so he used a shared consensus security method to transform the ETH world state tree calculation to do parallel computing sharding. Although this model has not been very successful, it is at least better than the current Layer2 solution to expand ETH, because it is closer to the key point of the ETH Sharding problem: transforming the world state tree. But Gavin Wood's above is not strong enough, so the performance improvement of Polkadot is only a slight multiple improvement based on the Ethereum network, without a qualitative leap. If he had done sharding based on the context of Satoshi Nakamoto when Bitcoin was created, he would not have encountered this problem. Because the calculation of Bitcoin's stateless computing UTXO account model is off-chain, it can naturally perform unlimited concurrency, and the implementation of the Lightning Network product is a practical implementation of the unlimited concurrency capability under Bitcoin's stateless computing UTXO model.
Such problems arise because the entire crypto industry has fallen into the ideological misunderstanding brought about by VB (i.e., the VB trap, the industry's exploration of context starting with VB is called the VB trap). There was no context before VB, and the context of the crypto game had already begun long before VB entered the circle. If everyone uses their brains a little, goes back to the context started by Satoshi Nakamoto, or even back to World War II, the era of Turing's computer theory and Shannon's information theory, the context will be more sufficient.
