I'm having some trouble fully understanding treechains and I'll be spending some more time researching its full extent, but I think I get the gist of it. It feels like the better way forward. Anyway, here's my thoughts.

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It's important to realize one of the most important reasons that make bitcoin work, is the fact nodes and miners must be aware of 'at least most things' that are happening in the network.

It's also important to realize one of the most important reasons bitcoin is hard to scale and (dare I say) 'fat', is the fact nodes and miners must, again, be aware of 'at least most things' that are happening in the network......

It's kind of crappy both those reason are the same.

I venture to say treechains are the superior scaling solution. Ie. allowing nodes and miners to be unaware of 'at least some things' that are happening in the network, without making it less secure and at the same time making it more flexible, more scalable and less fat? Sounds good to me. Sounds like the internet.

Now, I'm not saying bitcoin with just a vanilla blockchain cannot scale to a transaction frequency of say, 250k/sec, I'm saying that would be very hard. And yes, 250k/s may be orders of magnitude greater than Visa's puny (4k/s?) fiat network, and greater still than what we could even hope to require at this point in time, but that's exactly the magnitude the bitcoin community should be concerned with scaling to in the future. I think that may have been a key difference of opinion in the discussion between PT and GA following PT's initial tree chain description in the mailing list.

Don't be the guy that goes down in history saying: