Author: Mike Hearn 2015-06-15 10:36:35
Published on: 2015-06-15T10:36:35+00:00
The article talks about the issue of outsourcing to third-party services and the argument against it. The author discusses the difficulty of achieving a "trustless" querying of the UTXO set, even with commitments, due to the ever-changing nature of the data. The only way to achieve perfection is to be a full node and download all transactions yourself, but even then, there is still room for error. The compromise in this situation is to query multiple peers and cross-reference their answers, which provides more decentralization and robustness. However, this approach is not favored in Bitcoin Core, and developers are discouraged from trying it. Therefore, outsourcing to trusted services seems like an easier option. The author suggests that if one wants to remove central points of failure, they can run a bunch of servers themselves and let others run their own.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T23:06:42.546671+00:00