Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] instant confirmation via payment protocol backwards compatible proto buffer extension

From: Daniel Rice <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2014 10:36:36 -0700

> Supporting it in the protocol is easy. Building such a thing: that's
hard. Decentralised automated reputation systems are complex and subtle.

Bitcoin is valuable as a protocol because it is truly decentralized. The
complexity involved in building this system was expansive, but I think we
can all agree it was worth the trouble. With this particular topic of
instant transactions it seems we have to be very careful about pushing
Bitcoin in a centralized direction for the sake of a simple quick solution.
Building an automated system to solve the instant transaction problem will
be difficult, but also well worth the effort, and exactly like you're
saying Mike, I just want to make sure the door is left open protocol wise
for a robust solution in the future.

On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 9:09 AM, Mike Hearn <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I think that's true if you assume that the instant provider list is based
>> on a by hand created list of accepted instant providers. That's how VISA
>> works now and that's why I was asking for an approach where the
>> trusted_instant_providers list is scalable because that seems very
>> dangerous.
>>
>
> Supporting it in the protocol is easy. Building such a thing: that's hard.
> Decentralised automated reputation systems are complex and subtle.
>
> I don't feel strongly about whether the field should be "optional" or
> "repeated", 100% of implementations in the forseeable future would just
> look at the first item and ignore the rest. But if later someone did crack
> this problem it would lead to a simple upgrade path. So perhaps you're
> right and the protobuf should allow multiple signatures. It means a new
> sub-message to wrap the pki_type, pki_data and signature fields into one,
> and then making that repeated.
>
> Up to Lawrence.
>