Per Gall’s law, incremental iteration is often a better choice vs initial complex designs. Bitcoin, Solana, and the Pitfalls of Over-Engineering Gall’s Law tells us something deceptively simple: A complex system that works is always found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. This principle explains why some financial strategies and blockchain designs thrive, while others collapse under the weight of their own ambition. ⸻ Michael Saylor: Simplicity as a Strategy Michael Saylor’s playbook at MicroStrategy is a masterclass in Gall’s Law. His approach to corporate finance and Bitcoin is remarkably straightforward: •Buy Bitcoin. •Hold Bitcoin. •Buy more Bitcoin. No exotic structured products, no layered hedging strategies, no “innovative” experiments that add fragility. Saylor’s system works because it is simple, transparent, and resilient. Over time, the strategy compounds, and complexity emerges naturally — treasury management, debt issuance, and integration with corporate balance sheets — but the foundation remains elegantly simple. ⸻ Blockchain PhDs and the Trap of Complexity On the other hand, blockchain attracts designers with PhDs in computer science, mathematics, or cryptography. Their instinct is to start from the ivory tower: design highly theoretical, complex consensus models and architectures — DAGs, asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance, sharding — and then try to make them practical. The problem? Systems born in complexity often collapse the moment they face real-world demand. They don’t have the benefit of iterative refinement, because their starting point is already too convoluted. ⸻ Solana: Start Simple, Scale Later Solana’s story is different. Its founding bet was singular: speed matters most. Early Solana didn’t bother with priority fees, fancy scheduling, or over-engineered mechanisms to manage congestion. The system’s north star was simple — maximize throughput. This simplicity made it possible to prove product-market fit. Over time, refinements like local fee markets and priority transactions emerged. But these were iterations layered onto a simple, functional base. Solana didn’t start complex; it grew into complexity through lived stress tests, crashes, and recoveries. ⸻ Fantom: Complexity Without Resilience Then there’s Fantom, built on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) consensus model. On paper, it was elegant: infinite scalability, parallel validation, and minimal latency. In practice, however, when the XEN project began minting and occupied 99.9999% of blockspace, the network crumbled. Fantom’s theoretically “superior” architecture couldn’t handle a very basic stressor: high-volume simple transactions. The system needed to be redesigned from the ground up. Gall’s Law explains this perfectly — a complex system designed from scratch is brittle and destined to fail. ⸻ The Takeaway Bitcoin, Solana, and Fantom illustrate the truth of Gall’s Law in stark terms: •Bitcoin: Start with a simple store-of-value thesis. Scale into a trillion-dollar asset. •Solana: Start with speed. Add complexity only after proving demand. •Fantom: Start with complexity. Fail to handle the basics. In both finance and blockchain, the lesson is clear: simplicity wins the first battle, and only then can complexity evolve.(ⓧ JL 🛞X1)