Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of Adoption

Pursuing technical perfection over adoption is a great way to go bankrupt.

I suppose we should have seen this coming. The idealists crazy enough to shrug off the easy crypto money (hindsight bias acknowledged) in favor of the world’s most hated, yet most scalable blockchain, BSV, are letting that same idealism get in the way of what they now need the most, adoption.

Here’s a great example. For all intents and purposes, BSV has the lowest fees in blockchain. Yesterday, the fees were cut by 80%. In response, CSW chimes in with a congratulatory message.

More scale is great, and I don’t mind the “pedal to the metal” attitude. But, there is a problem underneath. Many BSV builders are chasing perfection at the expense of adoption. The barriers to adoption weren’t fees before the 80% cut, and they still won’t be if they get cut by 80% again.

Going by twitter-based word-count, one would suspect that the real barriers to BSV adoption are things like the back to genesis problem, not having real SPV, uncertainty around pruning or 0-sat transactions, a lack of interoperability, or, shockingly enough, fees that are too high. The focus is on creating a technically perfect system instead of using what we already have. 

Another great example.

Op_Return is the go-to method for storing data on the blockchain today. It is working quite well. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why delaying the progress of virtually every BSV product today in order to make a change like this would help BSV. Fortunately, this kindly worded suggestion is being ignored, for now. But, this doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of wasted effort on similar technical sentiments.

Time is money. Being early is expensive. If you are too early, you will go bankrupt. The longer you wait for perfection, whether that is the perfect token protocol, the lowest fees, the realest SPV, or anything else, the costlier that waiting becomes.

The way some builders in BSV act, one would think that the very worst thing that could happen is that people actually start using BSV and that the problems that emerge from a lack of perfection disrupt their experience. But, look at Ethereum! People (often naively) trust that you can fix your problems. And we can! But, fixing those problems, becoming more perfect, takes time and money. In BSV, we certainly can’t afford it without driving adoption first.