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But we’ve already established that we can do all that without the energy costs if we end up needing a trusted authority anyway. There’s zero need for proof of w
by ninkendo 4y ago
But we’ve already established that we can do all that without the energy costs if we end up needing a trusted authority anyway. There’s zero need for proof of work if you’re going to trust a central authority to validate the transaction history. What’s the point of such an extremely costly base layer?
- once_inc 4y agoI've yet to see a convincing argument why we end up with a trusted authority. Can you point me to which incentive would cause this?
- ninkendo 4y agoThe subject of this thread is reversibility, and how implementing that would involve trusting a central authority (goverment, etc) to force reversals of transactions on the chain. Per an ancestor comment you replied to: > Reversibility is one example of a design requirement that undoes the claimed advantages of permissionless blockchains that are meant to justify their inherent downsides. If we need reversibility on a permissionless blockchain, why have a blockchain? A postgres database would do fine. You could even broadcast the write-ahead log to allow any party to verify that history isn’t silently rewritten. You even said it yourself: > Do you not want to transact on the base layer because of lack of reversibility or fees? Move to a higher layer solution that sacrifices some characteristic of Bitcoin to enable something new. If we’ve established that reversibility is a table stakes requirement for a financial system, the thing you’re “sacrificing” is the very thing that makes PoW essential. Since PoW is planet-melting, can’t we just use a database instead?