Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Scaling Bitcoin conference micro-report

From: "Eric Lombrozo" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2015 21:45:04 +0000

------ Original Message ------
From: "s7r via bitcoin-dev" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Sent: 9/20/2015 2:33:38 PM
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Scaling Bitcoin conference micro-report

>The general threat model for which we want to scale is: larger user 
>base
>(not necessarily by increasing the blocksize - just increase the
>transactions per second using the best way from all points of view),
>more use cases for simple people who only do basic stuff, more
>popularity but all these without the possibility for some actor to
>control more than he should (like a government agency).

Larger user base won't necessarily protect against governments if we 
still have chokepoints they can go after. Given that as a currency 
Bitcoin  currently represents a negligible portion of the world's 
economy, even growing the user base by some small factor is at best a 
token gesture in our fight against governmental threats. If governments 
successfully take down critical pieces of our network infrastructure, 
Bitcoin will fail and most people will continue doing business as usual 
(using fiat currency), most of them never even noticing anything 
noteworthy happened at all.

What we really need to grow is the number of nodes on the network that 
participate in its basic infrastructure - namely: miners, validators, 
etc...and the more centralized these activities become, the easier it 
will be for governments to clamp down.