On 06/18/2015 06:33 PM, Mark Friedenbach wrote:

* Get safe forms of replace-by-fee and child-pays-for-parent finished and in 0.12.

* Develop cross-platform libraries for managing micropayment channels, and get wallet authors to adopt

* Use fidelity bonds, solvency proofs, and other tricks to minimize the risk of already deployed off-chain solutions as an interim measure until:

* Deploy soft-fork changes for truly scalable solutions like Lightning Network.

One of my biggest concerns is that these solutions (lightning network in particular) could end up being worse, in terms of decentralization, than would be a bitcoin network using larger blocks. We don't exactly know what the economies of scale are for pay hubs and could very well end up with far fewer hubs than nodes at any conceivable block size.

Of course, it could also turn out to be fantastic, but it seems like an enormous gamble to basically force everyone in the ecosystem to collectively spend millions of dollars upgrading to Lightning and then see whether it's actually an improvement in terms of decentralization.

To me, a much more sane approach would be to allow people to voluntarily opt in to those other solutions after we've had an opportunity to experiment with them and see how they actually function in practice, but that can't happen if the network runs out of capacity first.