&gt; They do not like to explain exactly what this &quot;better understanding&quot; actually is, given that computers haven&#x27;t got any slower.<p>Scalability isn&#x27;t only about going fast&#x2F;slow. Scalability is about growth in performance, reliability, guarantees, etc. What counts as better (or worse)? And what are the tradeoffs? And which tradeoffs can we reliably make without breaking the system&#x27;s guarantees, if indeed it makes any guarantees at all? It&#x27;s easy to see how Satoshi may not have been omnipotent. Indeed many programmers don&#x27;t always know all performance characteristics of all the software they write; too, we see programmers taking up opinions on system performance even when their opinion is wrong (some are even known to recognize when they are wrong and update their opinions based on new better knowledge).