Slow and steady wins the race

Bitcoin is often critized for being slow in everything

But here is the thing: the more you complicate a design early on, the more you push it down a specific road

Get your assumptions wrong, and it's off-road

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1/ Slow governance in networks means it's hard to take a turn left or right - if the current direction is strong, it makes it safe, attracting investors who believe it's the right direction and know deviation is unlikely

Slow governance does not mean development is slow btw

2/ It means that development is reviewed from many angles/participants, consuming a lot of time, meaning that the best possible outcome for all stakeholders is established

In small networks, these processes are faster - shortcuts can be taken, but wrong turns are more likely

3/ Tech is often said to be a rat race. However, it starts with the right assumptions.

If the wrong assumptions (turns) are made, you are driving towards an ending road, to eventually go off-road, getting lost and need to backtrack your way to an earlier waypoint.

4/ With Bitcoin it is not that much different, it is an open system with far more participants than any regular company

The larger its network effect, the slower governance becomes, but here is the advantage: it makes Bitcoin anti-fragile

5/ It is hard to do a corporate hostile take-over on Bitcoin.

Because it is hard, many people fork Bitcoin or create their own protocols. They believe Bitcoin is slow, hate its robust but slow governance. They think it makes Bitcoin weak.

So far, no success.

6/ Slow governance in a base layer protocol with a huge network effect equals security. It means safety.

Nobody should put large sums of money in a small network effect without trusting its base assumptions. Wrong assumptions = issues later.

7/ When designing protocols, keeping them as clean as possible, focussed on one primary purpose that later on can communicate with other protocols designed for other purposes, is a fruitful design approach.

The broader you design, the more limits you impose on a system.

8/ You literally create a framework with a bunch of assumptions and if one of them is wrong, the problems down the road are potentially huge to come back from.

EOS is a great example.

9/ Take Ethereum for example who, if they took more time in 2015 to base their assumptions, would have developed ETH 2.0 much faster.

Instead, they need to work around issues slipped in to design way back in 2015, causing doubt.

10/ Bitcoin tries to avoid such mistakes. Develop fast, implement slow. If you want to exist in 50 years, errors made now could significantly hurt future succes.

11/ I won't say that Bitcoin doesn't have its pitfalls. It does. It will need to evolve and grow further. But it has established its basis very strongly and requires careful decisions to keep it that way.

Get it assumptions right and you'll thrive.

Slow and steady wins the race