Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] trust

From: s7r <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Aug 2015 14:08:10 +0300

Interesting point of view Thomas! I agree that if we only think
towards one single direction (treat trust as a super bad thing) we
might miss some good features (or scalability levels) among the way.

Benjamin:
> Lightning assumes explicit trust and ID - much like Ripple. That's
> not going to work, and I'm surprised that someone with basic
> knowledge of crypto doesn't see this problem. Having explicit
> counter-parties is something very different from Bitcoin where the
> entity doing transactions verification is unknowable and changes
> all the time.

Can explain why exactly do you think this? What is the problem that
you see in lightning model exactly? I am not arguing, maybe you are
right and there is a part of the lightning network proposal which I
missed, so that is why I am asking for clarification here.

Lightning doesn't require explicit trust, worst case scenario you can
end up with coins blocked until next in-chain broadcast. It depends on
each and very hub, obviously there will also be trusted, identified
public hubs but we can also have anonymous hubs.

On 8/8/2015 12:24 PM, Benjamin via bitcoin-dev wrote:
>>> The point was NOT to trust no-one, the point was to trust
>>> everyone, but keep everyone honest by keeping the ledger open
>>> and publicly available.
> 
> Trust takes many different forms and is not a binary function. You
> trust a surgeon to do an operation and a pilot to fly a jet, but
> not vice versa. To trust someone explicitly, you need to know who
> they are. Most social structures work without explicit identity and
> they still function quite well. For example companies are mostly
> anonymous to the consumer - if you buy something in a shop you
> trust a chain of people producing that good. A priori there is
> little reason to trust others, but rather that trust is already
> developed through social institutions. Money is one such
> institution with specific trust problems, and the history of money
> is indeed a very good way to study these problems. Unfortunately in
> Bitcoin development such insights are rare to find.
> 
> Lightning assumes explicit trust and ID - much like Ripple. That's
> not going to work, and I'm surprised that someone with basic
> knowledge of crypto doesn't see this problem. Having explicit
> counter-parties is something very different from Bitcoin where the
> entity doing transactions verification is unknowable and changes
> all the time. Users of Bitcoin trust nodes doing the verification
> because they know it is in their best interest to be honest.
> Neither Sidechains nor LT have preserve that important property,
> and so IMO there are no good proposals to make Bitcoin scale (if
> that is possible at all).
> 
> On Sat, Aug 8, 2015 at 10:54 AM, Thomas Zander via bitcoin-dev 
> <[email-masked] 
> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> 
> I didn't say off-chain, and gave an example of on-chain usecase
> with trusted middleman.
> 
> So, no, that's not what I meant.
> 
> Sent on the go, excuse the brevity. Original Message From: Adam
> Back Sent: Saturday, 8 August 2015 09:50 To: Thomas Zander Cc:
> Bitcoin Dev Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] trust
> 
> If you are saying that some people are happy trusting other
> people, and so would be perfectly fine with off-chain use of
> Bitcoin, then we agree and I already said that off-chain use case
> would be a constructive thing for someone to improve scale and
> interoperability of in the post you are replying to. However that
> use case is not a strong argument for weakening Bitcoin's security
> to get to more scale for that use case.
> 
> In a world where we could have scale and decentralisation, then of 
> course it would be nice to provide people with that outlook more 
> security than they seem to want. And sometimes people dont
> understand why security is useful until it goes wrong, so it would
> be a useful thing to do. (Like insurance, your money being seized
> by paypal out of the blue etc). And indeed providing security at
> scale maybe possible with lightning like protocols that people are
> working on.
> 
> Adam