Have you heard of the great trilemma of money? Often referred to as the "blockchain trilemma", it refers to the unavoidable reality that a new money like #Bitcoin can only include any 2 out of 3 basic qualities in its original design, but not all 3.

𝗣𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝟮:

- 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱: No single person or group can control it.

- 𝗦𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗲: Your money is safe and transactions are unalterable.

- 𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲: The network can process large amounts of transactions quickly.

When I designed Bitcoin, this trilemma wasn't consciously on my mind, but it simply made sense to optimize for decentralization and security over scalability. Like with the Internet itself, additional layers could help scale the network, as we've seen with the Lightning Network and many other scaling solutions that are in development today.

Had I chosen either of the other possible combinations, Bitcoin would have failed in its infancy.

If Bitcoin had still become truly decentralized, but I had opted for scalability over security, Bitcoin would have been vulnerable to attacks, so no one would want to store their value in it.

If I had chosen to make Bitcoin secure and scalable, but not decentralized, it wouldn’t have been much different than the fiat system that it was built to replace, and likely much worse, as we can see with most altcoins.

And some altcoins weren't even built with security in mind, but only scalability, advertising their "fast transactions" while really just being a scheme for stealing money from retail investors.

Tradeoffs like these are a fact of life, and can be found in absolutely everything. With Bitcoin, I chose to sacrifice short-term quantity for long-term quality.

It looks like that strategy is playing out well. 😉