Author: Adam Back 2015-06-14 23:58:10
Published on: 2015-06-14T23:58:10+00:00
In this email exchange, Mike Hearn expresses concern that the Bitcoin industry is not taking enough development initiatives or integrating libraries. However, another person responds by pointing out that many companies have already built more scalable wallets over the past few years using Bitcoin via a library in a web scripting language. Nevertheless, Hearn clarifies that he is referring to the trend of outsourcing services and not running their own full node, which makes the service itself offered to their users not even SPV secure to the operator. He also mentions that some of these companies have a noted tendency not to upgrade or fix code. Hearn argues that if technologists want to move the technology forward, they should focus on building incrementally deployable solutions instead of changing parameters that run into an O(n^2) scaling wall or break decentralisation security. He suggests that there is no scalable and safe way to improve products without investing in the integration and coding implied to improve scalability. When discussing the computational complexity of the entire network, Hearn clarifies that he is referring to global bandwidth O(n^2) with n=users, or O(n) per user bandwidth cost to the system, while O(nm) is accurate nodes are an internal system concept. Additionally, he notes that there is no fixed relationship between transactions and fully validating nodes. Finally, when addressing the idea of raising the block size limit, Hearn points out that a hard-fork takes a long period of time to deploy due to the non-upgrade risk. While there may be a case for some increase to create breathing room, he emphasizes that it must be done in the context of the bigger picture of scaling and decentralizing tech.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T23:07:08.470514+00:00