Author: Benjamin 2015-08-08 12:01:58
Published on: 2015-08-08T12:01:58+00:00
The discussion is regarding the Lightning Network proposal and the problem of identifying users online. The issue is that if two parties, Alice and Bob, want to transact but have not exchanged keys before, they need public-key infrastructure out-of-band to identify themselves. This requires using SSL and Certificate authorities and trusting them. However, if there are non-cooperative hubs, they could flood the network and make it unusable, and there are no incentives for hubs to cooperate. One participant in the discussion argues that Lightning assumes explicit trust and ID, which is similar to Ripple, but this will not work. Having explicit counter-parties is different from Bitcoin, where the entity doing transactions verification is unknown and changes all the time. Users trust nodes doing verification because they know it is in their best interest to be honest. Neither Sidechains nor LT preserve this important property, and there are no good proposals to make Bitcoin scale. However, another participant argues that Lightning does not require explicit trust, and worst case scenario, coins can end up blocked until next in-chain broadcast. It depends on each hub, and there can be trusted, identified public hubs as well as anonymous hubs. Trust takes many forms and is not a binary function, and most social structures work without explicit identity. Money is a social institution with specific trust problems, and insights from the history of money are useful to study these problems.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T18:53:59.635302+00:00