Bitcoin think tank rejects science behind ‘limited adoption problem’ paper

cointelegraph.com:

A team of researchers from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, a non-profit think tank, have roundly rejected the conclusions reached in a 2022 paper claiming that Bitcoin (BTC) has an intrinsic scaling problem that will lead to limited adoption in the future.

According to the Bitcoin Policy Institute’s researchers, the original paper, dubbed “Bitcoin’s Limited Adoption Problem,” is predicated on three faulty assumptions.

First, the authors of the original paper claim that payments on the Bitcoin network require full network consensus for settlement. Second, they assert that the addition of miners to the network prolongs time to settlement by “delaying network consensus.” Third, they claim there’s an upper limit on Bitcoin payments due to the architecture of bitcoin’s blockchain.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute researchers reject each premise in a recently-published paper cheekily-titled “Bitcoin works in practice, but does it work in theory?”

The institute researchers, who hail from six different prestigious U.S. universities, claim that the so-called “limited adoption problem” is theoretical and counterintuitive to the reality of how bitcoin operates:

In rebuking the first paper’s assertions, the institute researchers argue that its authors “fundamentally misunderstand how Bitcoin achieves consensus and how the entry and exit of miners affects the timing of new transaction blocks,” and that their research ignores “existing, widely-implemented scaling solutions.”

While the institute research paper does conclude that the work being criticized comes to a sound conclusion — namely, that “Bitcoin’s blockchain does not scale well for on-chain payments,” it also points out that these scaling issues have been known since Bitcoin’s inception