I’m using “they” to refer to the larger community. Go back a few years ago and look at hypotheticals about changing bitcoin to deal with scaling issues. The thought was that when changes were needed the community would vote for those changes. Simple. Until it wasn’t.
But now voting power is too consolidated for any real community change to occur. The block size needs to change. Lightning doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. It just creates a new group of people with power to confirm transactions. Decentralized… until it isn’t.
There was this idea early on that power would be distributed across a wide range of people and the future of BTC would be transparent and democratic. I don’t know that mining pools were really forseen, at least not in the way the exist today.
I guess my point of this whole thread was that we quickly found out when something is “decentralized” it just results in a relatively small group of people becoming the defacto authority through force (in this case, sheer computational power). It was thought that wouldn’t be possible. But here we are.
> when something is “decentralized” it just results in a relatively small group of people becoming the defacto authority through force
Failure to grasp this principle accounts for a large percentage of libertarians, and to somewhat of a lesser, though still significant, degree, ideological conservatives.
Lightning solves the fundamental problem that a blockchain can’t scale to support the number of transactions needed. A block size limit increase can only get you so far. The block size will still need to increase with lightning at some point but it’ll be many orders of magnitude less.
Under lightning who is this new group that confirms transactions you’re concerned about? At the moment hashing power is fairly well distributed on the Bitcoin blockchain, not at all well on BCH. For lightning transactions there could be thousands of “people” you can decide to open a channel with. You can set up your own nodes if you wish.
But now voting power is too consolidated for any real community change to occur. The block size needs to change. Lightning doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. It just creates a new group of people with power to confirm transactions. Decentralized… until it isn’t.
There was this idea early on that power would be distributed across a wide range of people and the future of BTC would be transparent and democratic. I don’t know that mining pools were really forseen, at least not in the way the exist today.
I guess my point of this whole thread was that we quickly found out when something is “decentralized” it just results in a relatively small group of people becoming the defacto authority through force (in this case, sheer computational power). It was thought that wouldn’t be possible. But here we are.