Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] trust

From: Milly Bitcoin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Aug 2015 07:59:40 -0400

> Trust takes many different forms and is not a binary function.

Many Bitcoiners have a rather unusual notion of trust.  While many state 
the established financial systems cannot be trusted they imply that many 
within the Bitcoin world need to be trusted.   There are some very 
irresponsible and unusual people who have authority to do things in the 
Bitcoin world such as manage the Wiki, the Github repository, and are 
given an emergency alert key.  Some of these people are only known by 
some sort of screen name.  If anyone questions any of these processes 
they are chastised and labeled a "troll".  For instance, anyone who 
questioned Mt. Gox back in 2013 was labeled a "buttcoiner" or something 
similar.  So I would say many people, including many on this list, don't 
fully understand the claims they are making about the "truslessness" of 
Bitcoin.

 >Lightning doesn't require explicit trust,

There seems to be semantic issues with describing trust and the 
lightning network.  You need to trust the other party during the 
transactions in the channel for it to work.  Yes there is way to cash 
out if the other party does not cooperate but that is not the same thing 
as saying it is trustless.  Many people are confused about this part of 
decentralization where the network has to take time to reach consensus. 
  Some people think that you can use some kind of technological trick to 
avoid this lag time and still have a completely trustless system.  It is 
a tradeoff.

Russ