Prognostications on BSV: Data access

The potential future that BSV has ahead of it is way more technologically advanced than anything anyone is doing on it now. And that is in the immediate years ahead of us. It’s the early days. The hard grunt work of bootstrapping BSV is being done now, by the early adopters.

I do not believe that anyone knows for sure what that potential future will look like, but I regularly talk to people who have opinions. One of the topics they know about is the ability to access any transaction from any block on demand will be a fundamental feature of the future. Some believers also seem to also switch between “fundamental feature” and “fundamental right”.

There is no evidence to support this. None. Regardless of whether it is right or wrong, it seems most commonly to be stated as wishful thinking. Is it possible their expected outcome will be the outcome we see? Yes. But on the other hand, it can also be argued to be ridiculous. If Craig believes that internet traffic will be based on Bitcoin, and things he has said have implied this in my opinion, then this could easily become the storage of all internet traffic as part of that set of transactions. We already see repeated posting of dog pictures causing bigger blocks to happen without it being useful things like a sheer volume of payments and general utility related transactions.

Who will store all this minutia in such a way that it is readily accessible to anyone who needs to access anything? If you as a developer design a product in a way that depends on instant arbitrary transaction access, and this goes away as block sizes increase, can the users seek recourse against you? My experience is that users do not know how the technology works at all, and have no clue about the technological choices made by the developers. They do not know about the risks they assume, or the potential loss or loss of access of data that many developers proclaim they “own” because they “use Bitcoin”.

My prognostication is that it is not possible to know the infrastructure of our Bitcoin future. Even Craig probably just has an educated guess. To assume that there will be services which provide instant access to any transaction you may find yourself requiring, is an assumption and not an inevitability or a right. If I am to develop something I need to do so considering the range of possibilities, not just the one I want. Personally I do not care how it turns out. I will try and be prepared and adapt to it.

I am not a Bitcoin expert.