Quote from: BrewMaster on Today at 02:15:19 PM

what exactly do you mean by "put trust in miners" here?

There are many proposals and ideas being abandoned or lack support in the community because of slogans like "Don't trust, verify" and wrong assumptions about the criteria in which one can count on PoW and miners. For instance:
- We have UTXO commitment proposals that could help with the insane "sync form Genesis" policy but are not getting support because of a general hesitation of relying too much on PoW.
- We have Drivechain and sidechains scaling solutions being left in darkness and confusion because people are arguing about how miners can steal all funds deposited there overnight.
- Most importantly, sharding schemes are being criticized for their too much reliance on PoW and mining.

The problem with this paranoia about mining is its lack of theoretic transparency. The advocates representing such paranoia have never established a reasonable framework to specify in what aspects and by what extent one can rely on PoW and where it is not a reliable source of trust.

In this topic, instead of vague and political ideas about how reliable are miners in bitcoin, I'm establishing a criteria-based measure: Miners are reliable as far as:
1- Provably, they are not inflating the supply of bitcoins out of the regulations.
2- There is proof that any incoming fund to a wallet approved by miners, comes with an equal deduction from the ledger maintained by them.
3- There is a safe threshold for the number of confirmations where the costs of rewriting the blockchain outperform any criminal incentive for defrauding users by orders of magnitude.

Suppose we have zero coins allocated to our wallet in a PoW network in which miners commit not only to blockchain but also to the total balance of the distributed ledger. Instead of running a full node and start syncing from the genesis, we choose to use a mobile client that commits to the longest available chain that fits into some mathematical constraints for its difficulty and height (like the one I've provided a while ago) and most importantly exact compliance between total balance committed by miners and the expected balance as of what the protocol implies for the given height. After a very rapid synchronization phase, we start receiving blocks from peers and verifying them by:
1- Checking the work.
2- Controlling the consistency of the block balance with the protocol

Additionally, we would choose a safe threshold for the number of required confirmations proportional to the value of assets involved.

Such a scheme is absolutely dependent on miners as a trusted party and at the same time, it is provably secure.