Original Vision

Summary:

The current debate surrounding Bitcoin is not just about block size or hard-forks, it's about the original author's intentions for the system. According to Santino Napolitano, who has studied everything he could find from the original author, it appears clear that the incentive for running a full network node was to enable mining and provide rewards in the form of new coins and transaction fees. The original author also intended organizations operating full network nodes to provide connectivity to light clients, which would make up the majority of the user base. This is consistent with current trends in Internet consumption, where tablets and phones are becoming more preferred than traditional computers. While the whitepaper speaks of the design goal as not having a need for a trusted third party, some amount of localized trust may be a necessary trade-off, and businesses should still run their own full network node if they want a completely trustless guarantee. The global decentralized consensus is meant to make the network resilient to a single government or other adversary's ability to shut the network down. It does not appear that the original author intended for every individual to run a full network node at home or in their pocket.Moreover, the original author believed that fraud proofs would be widely available and practical, and if they were, SPV client security would be much closer to full node security than it is today. However, no design for fraud proofs which is both efficient and secure has been proposed, much less implemented and deployed. Therefore, the perception that SPV clients could be made nearly as secure as full nodes is an example of something that was wrong.In conclusion, revisiting the original author's design and scaling intentions might be helpful for moving forward together with a better understanding of what Bitcoin means to people and how it will grow.

Updated on: 2023-06-10T01:35:44.354125+00:00