According to the CEO of Synonym, speaking at the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano, the solution to scaling Bitcoin is to empower users to apply trust in a peer-to-peer manner.
Speaking to Atlas21 during the Plan ₿ Forum 2025 in Lugano, John Carvalho, CEO of Synonym, presented a contrarian vision on the future of Bitcoin and the scalability issue. For the CEO of Synonym, the problem is not scaling Bitcoin, but scaling trust.
Can you provide us with a summary of your speech “Fix the Money, then what?”?
“My speech explores the different approaches to solving Bitcoin’s scalability problem and refutes the methods we’ve tried in the past. For example, the Lightning Network is a way of introducing trust into the use of Bitcoin. Ultimately, any method that introduces complexity along with trust cannot compete with methods that use only trust and leave out complexity.
What we’re really trying to figure out is how to scale trust, not complexity. The scalability problem isn’t about the Bitcoin protocol at all; it’s about figuring out how to solve trust-related issues, such as coordination, attribution, and finding ways to establish credit with people. We need to learn from how large-scale payments work: they all make extensive use of trust, and this fundamentally constitutes a power law that applies to all networks. And we need to focus more on empowering the individual to apply trust rather than trying to scale Bitcoin through complexity.”
What is Pubky and how does it fit into Synonym’s vision?
“Pubky is part of a broader effort where we’re trying to develop a fully functioning system that can be the foundation of a free market society and economy. Pubky’s role is essentially to address networking aspects, the web. It’s a concept comparable to things like Bluesky, Nostr, or other ways of creating a new web. It’s similar, but we have a very different approach.
The peculiarity of Pubky is the use of public keys in a way similar to Bitcoin, but as if they were domain names. We take the DNS record – which we call PKDNS – we sign it with that key and put it into something called Mainline DHT, which is the largest and most decentralized network in the world, much larger than Bitcoin. It’s the network that powers coordination for torrents. The DHT makes it possible to connect all the different nodes. We use this as a domain name system. So you always have control over where your data resides on the network, instead of leaving it to ICANN or some other trusted entity.”
Ark Labs has launched Arkade in public beta. What’s your opinion?
“I think the team is excellent. There are two teams I know that work on Ark and different implementations. I like both, they’re all talented guys. But again, I personally no longer believe in the idea of scaling Bitcoin. And I don’t believe in the idea of adding complexity to Bitcoin as a method to scale, because I simply don’t think it can compete with trust, which removes complexity.
For example, just look at the popularity of Wallet of Satoshi, which is entirely based on trust, compared to a self-custodial Lightning wallet and the number of users. That’s the proof. People are happy to trust up to a certain amount to have a better user experience.”
Are you in favor of the idea of ossifying the Bitcoin protocol?
“Nobody intends to ossify Bitcoin. This term is only used as a front argument because in reality nobody really believes that nothing more should be done on Bitcoin. We all know that software changes, platforms change, new technology is invented. And so, there will always be some reason to improve Bitcoin, as far as its efficiency, speed, and simplicity are concerned. But I don’t think complexity falls into this.”
What do you think about the debate regarding spam and OP_RETURN?
“I think it’s the most insincere debate I’ve ever seen in Bitcoin. Any amount of time spent paying attention to the discussion is a waste of time, unless you’re just trying to learn a bit more about how Bitcoin works.
Ocean isn’t really concerned about what kind of data is on Bitcoin, because this has been a problem for a long time and they only started talking about it when they started the company. Nobody is really worried that spam is a problem. All Bitcoin transactions are spam to me, I only care about mine. This is Bitcoin’s problem or its non-scalability. Everyone has to have copies of all transactions or it doesn’t work. So if you want to call specific transactions spam, it’s just your subjective opinion. And if we get better at subjectively removing the ways people use Bitcoin, we’re making it less valuable and we’re getting better at censoring Bitcoin’s use cases. It seems to me totally the wrong direction.”
Jack Dorsey has stated that Bitcoin could fail if it weren’t used as a medium of exchange. Do you agree?
“I don’t know if I completely agree with this. There’s the digital gold argument and there’s the money thesis. But for the money thesis there’s also the issue that Bitcoin doesn’t scale. How could there ever be hyper-bitcoinization if everyone or most people can’t use it? On the other hand, it’s argued that if people only HODL, there are no transaction fees and so security starts to decline and eventually Bitcoin dies. I think that’s mainly just theoretical. We can’t really know.
But if you believe Bitcoin can scale, then it’s much easier to believe that everyone can use it and that’s the use case. I would say I’m somewhere in the middle and I would approach it differently. I would say we need blocks to be full to always have demand, security, and actual utility. Is Bitcoin useful if nobody uses it? If nobody uses it, is Bitcoin valuable? And so in that sense I agree with him. But I also don’t think Bitcoin can scale. So, if you’re willing to compromise and combine the idea of leveraging trust with that of scaling trust using Bitcoin, you can start to see how it’s possible to have both: give the individual the ability to apply trust effectively, and at the same time use bitcoin as one of the assets that people employ as collateral for that trust.”
So Bitcoin will never be able to scale according to you?
“No, it won’t scale. My bet is that if we understand how to scale trust in a peer-to-peer way, we can figure out how to scale anything.”
