Bitcoin Think Tank Disputes Evidence on ‘Adoption Difficulty’ Research

Bitcoin Policy Institute Refutes Claims of Intrinsic Scaling Issue

The findings of a 2022 paper which asserted that Bitcoin (BTC) has an intrinsic scaling issue that will impede its future acceptance have been thoroughly repudiated by a group of researchers from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, a non-profit think tank.

The researchers at the Bitcoin Policy Institute have concluded that the paper entitled “Bitcoin’s Limited Adoption Problem” is based on three incorrect assumptions.

First, the authors of the original paper state that payments on the Bitcoin network necessitate total network agreement for resolution. Second, they assert that the inclusion of miners to the network lengthens time to settlement by “postponing network consensus.” Third, they affirm that there is a maximum amount of Bitcoin payments due to the structure of bitcoin’s blockchain.

The researchers at the Bitcoin Policy Institute have refuted the arguments put forth in the recently released paper with the humorous title “Bitcoin works in practice, but does it work in theory?”

Researchers from six esteemed U.S. universities associated with the institute argue that the concept of the “limited adoption problem” is merely theoretical and contradictory to the actual functioning of bitcoin.

Research Paper Concludes Bitcoin Scales Through Off-Chain Payments

The institute researchers rebuked the first paper’s assertions, claiming 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 overlooks “existing, widely-implemented scaling solutions.”

The research paper from the institute concludes that the work being critiqued reaches a valid resolution – that Bitcoin’s blockchain does not effectively facilitate on-chain payments – yet it also notes that these scaling issues have been acknowledged since Bitcoin’s beginning and have been properly addressed since then.

In conclusion, the institute team has determined that the original paper’s authors are “fighting a losing battle” since “bitcoin scales through off-chain payments, not by raising capacity at the base layer. Off-chain protocols are more scalable precisely because they do not require agreement from every node on the network.”

Reject CBDCs and instead focus on Bitcoin and stablecoins as proposed by the Bitcoin think tank.