------ Original Message ------
From: "Milly Bitcoin via bitcoin-dev"
<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
To: bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
Sent: 9/20/2015 3:51:36 PM
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Scaling Bitcoin conference micro-report
Some of us have also been actively working towards developing
a more modular, layered architecture and better implementations that
will afford greater decentralization in software development with less
need for critical code reviews, less pushback from downstream
developers
who must continuously rebase, a better process for building consensus
in
the community, and simpler app migration.
It sounds more efficient but it is not clear to me that it would change
the level of centralization of how the final decisions are made.
One threat to Bintcoin involves incentive for companies to hire
developers. The only reason is to change (or not change) Bitcoin Core
so it is beneficial to their interests. I am not sure anything can be
done about that risk but it needs to be understood and considered and
not just ignored.
Core development process and decentralized dev/community consensus
building (in particular for consensus-critical changes) is at the top of
my priorities as issues right now...and one that I'd love to discuss
more in depth...but it probably deserves its own thread. The political
angle seems very difficult right now while the systems architecture
stuff seems a bit more tractable...and it seems that without
architectural changes it will be extremely hard to decentralize
development and easily bring large numbers of new developers in.
We need to increase the basic infrastructure nodes by a factor much
larger than 2 or 3...more like 100 or 1000...and it's entirely doable
with properly aligned incentives.
I assume that would mean fees that hike transaction fees and make
Bitcoin more expensive?
Not necessarily. Right now we already pay around 3,600 bitcoins a day in
inflationary subsidies, very little of which goes to the majority of
critical infrastructure nodes and their operators. This is a problem
with the current protocol design, one we'll hopefully be able to fix.
Having more core infrastructure nodes doesn't need to raise costs per
transaction - but it will most likely require abandoning the current
approach of having three basic node classes: miners (which tend towards
centralized pools), full nodes (which must validate each of everyone's
transaction and in return get paid nothing), and thin clients (which
essentially amount to parasitic nodes that do not contribute any
resources back to the network and must be subsidized).
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