On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 9:58 PM, Akiva Lichtner wrote: > Correct me if I am wrong, but the dream of a virtual currency where > everybody is equal and runs the client on their mobile device went out the > window long ago. I think that went out with the special mining hardware. If
Mining equipment isn't for transaction verification. The mining equipment is used to work on Proof-of-Work. Thanks. > my organization had to accept bitcoin payments I would assume that we'll > need a small server farm for transaction verification, and that we would see Unfortunately Bitcoin does not work like those centralized systems; it should not be surprising that a system focused so much on decentralized and independent verification would have developers working on so many non-bandwidth scaling solutions. These other proposals seek to preserve existing properties of Bitcoin (such as cheap verification, low-bandwidth) while also increasing the amount of activity that can enjoy the decentralized fruits of Proof-of-Work labor. But not helpful to assume this can only look like Visa or any database on a cluster etc... > would be entirely okay for a guy on a smartphone to delegate verification to > a trusted party, as long as the trust chain stops there and there is plenty > of choice. I don't suppose I could tempt you with probabilistically checkable proofs, could I? These verify in milliseconds, grow sublinear in size of the total data, but have no near-term proposal available yet. > I am guessing the trustless virtual currency police would get pretty upset > about such a pragmatic approach, but it's not really a choice, the failure > to scale has already occurred. All things considered I think that Bitcoin Perhaps instead of failure-to-scale you mean "failure to apply traditional scaling has already failed", which shouldn't be so surprising given the different security model that Bitcoin operates on. > most people trust at least one other person, so it's not that weird. see the following recent text, """ Bitcoin is P2P electronic cash that is valuable over legacy systems because of the monetary autonomy it brings to its users through decentralization. Bitcoin seeks to address the root problem with conventional currency: all the trust that's required to make it work-- -- Not that justified trust is a bad thing, but trust makes systems brittle, opaque, and costly to operate. Trust failures result in systemic collapses, trust curation creates inequality and monopoly lock-in, and naturally arising trust choke-points can be abused to deny access to due process. Through the use of cryptographic proof and decentralized networks Bitcoin minimizes and replaces these trust costs. With the available technology, there are fundamental trade-offs between scale and decentralization. If the system is too costly people will be forced to trust third parties rather than independently enforcing the system's rules. If the Bitcoin blockchain’s resource usage, relative to the available technology, is too great, Bitcoin loses its competitive advantages compared to legacy systems because validation will be too costly (pricing out many users), forcing trust back into the system. If capacity is too low and our methods of transacting too inefficient, access to the chain for dispute resolution will be too costly, again pushing trust back into the system. """ - Bryan http://heybryan.org/ 1 512 203 0507 _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
