Author: s7r 2015-08-08 11:08:10
Published on: 2015-08-08T11:08:10+00:00
The conversation between Thomas, Benjamin, and Adam revolves around the topic of trust in the Bitcoin network. Benjamin argues that Lightning Network assumes explicit trust and identity, which is different from Bitcoin where transaction verification is unknowable and changes all the time. He believes it won't work and is surprised that someone with basic knowledge of crypto doesn't see this problem. Benjamin further explains that to trust someone explicitly, one needs to know who they are. However, most social structures work without explicit identity. On the other hand, Thomas and Adam believe that some people are happy trusting others, and off-chain use of Bitcoin would be a constructive thing for someone to improve scale and interoperability. However, that use case is not a strong argument for weakening Bitcoin's security to get more scale. They believe that it would be nice to provide people with more security than they seem to want, but sometimes people don't understand why security is useful until it goes wrong. Providing security at scale may be possible with lightning-like protocols that people are working on.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T18:54:58.238059+00:00