+1. Justus, I've been reading some of your work and I really like your push to clearly and precisely define the cryptocurrency terms we're using. Here's what I had jotted down yesterday, which sort of jives with the two points you made above:
Bitcoin is decentralized if no entity exists with the ability to costlessly double-spend or bar valid transactions from the blockchain.
Thoughts?
I honestly think the term "decentralized" has been ruined and I'd rather avoid it as much as possible.
I'd rather express Bitcoin security in terms of:
- What are the adverse behaviors a user might experience?
- How does an attacker benefit from bringing about those adverse behaviors, and how much does it cost them to perform the attack?
- What actions can users take to reduce their risk?
...then express hypothetical changes to Bitcoin in terms of how they affect the answers to the following three questions.
I think of Bitcoin security as being successful if it can guarantee the following
- 1 - Are transactions irreversible - Meaning once received is the transaction immutable on the network.
- 2 - Can anyone, anywhere interact directly with the network to spend or receive funds - Meaning it is censorship resilient and people cannot have their activity suppressed (regardless of legality)
- 3 - Can individuals maintain sole control over their funds - Meaning mechanisms exist that enable people store and control BTC with zero intermediary risk
Decentralization and everything else is a means to those ends.
What is so frustrating is many of the core devs positions are against these outcomes. For example: A) Artificially limited transaction volume reduces property 2 above (i.e. it limits the # of people who can interact directly with the network. B) Peter Todd's full-RBF proposal reduces property 1 above by largely eliminating the zero-confirm guarantees the P2P network provides today. C) Sidechains reduce property 1 above if they pull transaction fees off the main chain (which reduces the effort required for a miner attack)