Original Vision

Summary:

The email conversation between Eric Lombrozo and Patrick Strateman in 2015 focused on potential optimizations for future protocols related to Bitcoin. Lombrozo pointed out that the SPV system was fundamentally flawed in its current form, but spoke about the potential for fraud proofs to be widely available in the future. He noted that fraud proofs did not necessarily need to be super efficient, but they did need to be secure, with incentives aligned correctly. Lombrozo argued that producing a market for fraud-proof solutions was crucial, as very few would actually need to be executed, with the threat being much stronger than the execution. Strateman contended that if fraud proofs were practical, SPV client security would be much closer to full node security than it currently is. However, no design for fraud proofs that was both efficient and secure had been proposed, much less implemented or deployed. Santino Napolitano interjected with an interpretation of Satoshi's original vision for Bitcoin, arguing that the incentive for running a full network node was initially to enable mining, with proceeds from new coins and transaction fees as a reward. Napolitano suggested that it appeared clear that the original author intended organizations operating full network nodes to provide connectivity to light clients, which would make up the majority of the user base. He also argued that having a completely decentralized and trustless system for every client was not necessarily the original design goal, and some amount of localized trust was perhaps necessary. The global decentralized consensus was meant to make the network resilient to a single government or other adversary's ability to shut it down.

Updated on: 2023-06-10T01:36:28.714711+00:00