Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 5 from 2 users
Topic OP
Signature aggregation for scaling - what is possible?
by
BrotherCreamy
on 24/09/2022, 03:33:44 UTC
⭐ Merited by hugeblack (4) ,ETFbitcoin (1)
Hi guys,

I have spent a while reading about BIPs 340-342, but I'm struggling to find a definitive answer about how these BIPs will address scaling issues.

To give some context:
I am concerned with the future user scaling of Bitcoin. When there are 5 billion users, no individuals will be able to afford to transact on-chain - 5 billion people => 1 transaction per person per 27 years - unless there is some highly scalable way of aggregating transactions.
Lightning does not address this problem. Lightning improves transaction speed and volume, but it does not solve the root problem of redeeming one's coins on-chain. There are proposed solutions such as channel factories, but these are still worthless without the possibility to redeem on-chain.
At this point you may as well just create a separate token called LNBTC and operate Lighting independent of Bitcoin.

My thought was that there need's to be some way of creating a multi-sig coinjoin/pool that allows a subset of the users in the pool to aggregate their signatures together and move their coins into another pool in a single transaction, while still retaining ownership of the coins.
Each pool may include thousands of equal-valued inputs. In order to spend your input, you would assemble a transaction with a subset of the pool participants which would have the effect of spending an amount from the pool that is proportional to the number of people in the subset.
This way users would be able to reduce their transaction fee to a small fraction of a standard transaction fee - e.g. 1/1000th of a regular transaction - *if* such a functionality was possible.
(Marginal improvements in transaction cost - e.g. 50% cheaper, or even 95% cheaper - are still not enough to make Bitcoin scalable to billions of users.)

In my opinion, without such a functionality, Bitcoin is unable to be scaled in a decentralised manner.
There can still be banks who issue promises backed by Bitcoin, but user's would not have the ability to redeem their coins in the event the bank breaks their promise.

Please tell me what you think.

Cheers,
BrotherCreamy