Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Tree-chains preliminary summary

From: Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 15:34:31 -0700

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 2:03 PM, Mark Friedenbach <[email-masked]> wrote:
> More importantly, to your last point there is absolutely no way this
> scheme can lead to inflation. The worst that could happen is theft of
> coins willingly put into the pegging pool. But in no way is it possible
> to inflate the coin supply.

I don't think it would be entirely unfair to describe one of the
possible ways a secondary coin becoming unbacked can play out as
inflation— after all, people have described altcoins as inflation. In
the worst case its no _worse_ inflation, I think, than an altcoin is—
however.

> I will look at your proposal in more depth. But I also think you should
> give 2-way pegging a fair shake as pegging to side chains and private
> accounting servers may eliminate the need.

I think that chain geometries which improve the scale/decentralization
trade-off are complementary. If PT's ideas here do amount to something
that gives better scaling without ugly compromise I believe it would
still be useful no matter how well the 2-way peg stuff works simply
because scaling and decenteralization are both good things which we
would pretty much always want more of...