Author: Jameson Lopp 2015-06-27 18:02:05
Published on: 2015-06-27T18:02:05+00:00
In an email exchange, Peter Todd and Michael Naber discuss the concept of global network consensus in Bitcoin. Naber argues that off-chain solutions, such as hub-and-spoke payment channels and the Lightning network, do not exhibit this characteristic and are therefore not considered global network consensus networks. Todd explains that these solutions are actually more efficient ways of using on-chain transactions to move assets from point A to point B, resulting in more economic transactions being done with fewer but not zero blockchain transactions. He points out that off-chain transaction systems like Changetip allow economic transactions to occur with no blockchain transactions at all. Naber then asks if there is a way to achieve global consensus while scaling better than Bitcoin Core's O(N) scalability, to which Todd responds that the network scales with O(n^2) with Naber's criteria. Each node creates k transactions, so each node has to verify k*n transactions, resulting in O(n^2) total work. For Bitcoin to have O(n) scaling, it would be necessary to assume that the number of validation nodes does not scale with the number of users, resulting in a trust-based system. Todd argues that instead of changing Bitcoin into a trust-based system, it is better to preserve its global consensus functionality and build a trust-based system on top of it.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T01:21:35.499840+00:00