Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Why Satoshi's temporary anti-spam measure isn'ttemporary

From: Mark Friedenbach <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2015 11:02:43 -0700

They aren't really so closely related as you are implying, since bitcoin is
a trustlessly decentralized system. At present every participant needs to
be able to validate the entire chain in order to be certain that their copy
of the ledger state is correct, and miners need to be able to incrementally
validate blocks in particularly short timeframes or else.

It is possible for a decentralized system like bitcoin to scale via
distribution in a way that introduces minimal trust, for example by
probabilistic validation and distribution of fraud proofs. However changes
to bitcoin consensus rules (mostly soft-forks) are required in order to
make this possible.

I don't want to discourage thinking about scaling bitcoin in such ways, as
it is a viable medium term proposal. However right now with the bitcoin
that exists today parallel distribution and decentralization are at odds
with each other.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Thomas Zander via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> On Thursday 30. July 2015 18.07.40 Thomas Zander via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > Remember when we went from single-core CPUs to multi-core (and
> > hyperthreading)? Developers were saying it was useless because all apps
> > were  still single-threaded.  And now, 15 years later, there are
> fantastic
> > frameworks to make this easy.
> >
> > Same will happen with distributed. Any assumption you wrote above is not
> > inherent in the technology.
>
> My brain went a bit to fast (dinner was being served, she made me close the
> laptop...) and wrote distributed above while the topic is decentralized.
> Its not entirely wrong, even; Libraries or approaches that do distributed
> will
> be useful for decentralized systems.  ;)
>
> --
> Thomas Zander
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