Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Thoughts on Forks, Scalability, and other Bitcoin inconveniences.

From: Eric Lombrozo <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Jul 2015 12:55:47 -0700

I should clarify that by "most use cases" I'm not envisioning a bunch of
cryptogeeks [us, or at least myself and a few of us] happily buying up hard
disks, waiting hours, days, weeks to spawn up new full nodes. I'm
envisioning a world where every person has access to this technology and
finds it practical, convenient, and safe ti use.

- Eric Lombrozo
On Jul 5, 2015 11:50 AM, "Eric Lombrozo" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Blockchain validation has become too expensive to properly secure the
> network as per our original security model. The level of validation
> required to comply with our security model has become completely
> impractical for most use cases. Block space is still cheap only because of
> block reward subsidy (which decreases exponentially with time). The
> economics are already completely jacked - larger blocks will only worsen
> this disparity.
>
> The only practical way for the network to function at present (and what
> has essentially ended up happening, if often tacitly) is by introducing
> trust, in validators, miners, relayers, explorer websites, online wallets,
> etc...which in and of itself wouldn't be the end of the world were it not
> for the fact that the raison d'etre of bitcoin is trustlessness - and the
> security model is very much based on this idea. Because of this, there's
> been a tendency to deny that bitcoin cannot presently scale without trust.
> This is horrible because our entire security model has gone out the
> window...and has been replaced with something that isn't specified at all!
>
> We don't really know the boundaries of our model, as the fork a couple of
> days ago demonstrated. Right now we're basically trusting a few devs and
> some mining pool operators that until now have been willing to cooperate
> for the benefit of the network. It is dangerous to assume this will
> continue perpetually. Even assuming the best intentions, an incident might
> occur that this cooperation cannot easily repair.
>
> We need to either solve the validation cost/bottleneck issue...or we need
> to construct a new security model that takes these trust assumptions into
> account.
>
> - Eric Lombrozo
>