Nick Szabo. In his 2017 essay “Money, Blockchains, and Social Scalability,” he argues that the most successful systems don’t scale by adding features or rules but by removing the need for trust, permission, and interpersonal negotiation. “Social scalability is the ability of an institution, such as a language, a money, or a blockchain, to overcome shortcomings in human minds and institutions that limit who or how many can successfully participate.” -@NickSzabo4 Gold and fiat systems require large amounts of trust, legal enforcement, and intermediaries ie. banks, courts, vaults, governments. Those are social friction points. They cap scale. Bitcoin removes them through automation and cryptography. Consensus replaces courts. Code replaces trust. Verification replaces belief. “Bitcoin sacrifices computational efficiency to improve social scalability,” -@NickSzabo4 This tradeoff is the heart of Bitcoin’s design. It’s slow and costly by intention. Every node validates every transaction so that no one must trust anyone else. That’s what allows millions of people, banks, and nations to share one monetary ledger without fighting or relying on middlemen. Gold can’t do that. It needs vaults, audits, and armies. Fiat can’t do that. It needs debt ceilings, regulators, and politics. Bitcoin does it automatically.