Over the course of the development of all technologies including the ethernet and the internet, experts and the mainstream media have always presumed a static growth, trying to predict the ultimate capacities of technologies during their exponential growth period.
In the 1980s, the mainstream media consistently released publications with their newly found proof to falsify the technological benefits of the Ethernet. During the first year, publications attempted to convince their readers that Ethernet was sure to decline due to its 1 megabyte limit. The next year, media outlets reported the same story, but with 10 megabytes. Months later, the same publications stated that the Ethernet couldn’t scale to gigabytes.
The same pattern and relationship can be recognized with Bitcoin and the mainstream media. Since 2013, the userbase, demand, and price of Bitcoin have increased explosively, captivating the attention of traditional investors across the globe.
As the attention intensified, like they did with all the other major technologies, the mainstream media began to obsess with a problem of Bitcoin which hasn’t turned out to be an issue yet.
“So far, i haven’t seen any problems with Bitcoin that are unsolvable. These problems are technical but they are solvable. The network is incredibly dynamic and resilient,” Bitcoin expert and author of Mastering Bitcoin Andreas Antonopoulos explained during his talk at the O’Reilly Radar Summit that users . “‘I’m not worried about optimization and I’m not worried about scaling,” continued Antonopoulos.
It is rare to observe the growth of a flexible and resilient network like the Bitcoin network. One strong feature of the Bitcoin network is its power to adapt to challenges and scale with them as it grows in size and volume.
Bitcoin will continue to face bigger challenges, problems, and issues in the following years. However, users, experts, and the mainstream media should not preoccupy themselves with problems without signs.
“Don’t start getting worried about a problem until we still seeing signs of a problem,” concluded Antonopoulos.