On the scalability issues of onboarding millions of LN mobile clients

Posted by Antoine Riard

May 6, 2020/09:06 UTC

The conversation starts with a discussion on the consensus capture argument by miners and the assumptions made about topology and deployment for such an attack to succeed. The speaker raises concerns about the need for diversification of gateways, chain access providers, and miners to avoid collusion. The use of fork anomalies detection is suggested as a solution to this problem. The importance of having a wide-enough, sane backbone network is emphasized to build on top of, which requires node adoption to be fostered.The conversation then shifts to a debate on the trust-minimization of Bitcoin's security model that has always relied on running a full-node. The speaker argues that this paradigm may shift with the adoption of Lightning Network, which offers fast, affordable, confidential, censorship-resistant payment services without users running a full-node. However, another participant in the conversation opposes this view and suggests that all efforts to improve the "full node-less" experience should be actively avoided. They argue that Bitcoin's security depends on the assumption that a supermajority of the economy is verifying their incoming transactions using their own full node, and without serious improvements to the full node ratio, Bitcoin is likely to fail. They also oppose merging support for BIP 157 in Core, as it does not provide any real benefits to full node users compared to more efficient protocols like Stratum/Electrum. The conversation ends with links to articles supporting these arguments.

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