Author: Benjamin 2015-08-08 09:24:18
Published on: 2015-08-08T09:24:18+00:00
The author of this post argues that trust is not a binary function and that it takes many different forms. Trust can be implicit in social structures, such as the anonymity of companies to consumers. The history of money is a good way to study trust problems, but unfortunately, insights into these issues are rare to find in Bitcoin development. Lightning assumes explicit trust and ID, which is not going to work, given that users of Bitcoin trust nodes doing the verification because they know it is in their best interest to be honest. Neither Sidechains nor LT preserve that important property, and so there are no good proposals to make Bitcoin scale if that is possible at all. In the conversation thread, there is a discussion about off-chain use of Bitcoin as a constructive thing for improving scale and interoperability, but it is not a strong argument for weakening Bitcoin's security to get more scale. Providing security at scale may be possible with lightning-like protocols that people are working on.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T18:54:30.675170+00:00