What Does Scaling Bitcoin Mean? What Are We Scaling?

Bitcoin has the problem of scaling.

It is designed to facilitate payments that do not depend on third reliable third parties, and in order to complete this, the system must be subject to verification of all users to ensure that the payments are valid without trusting a third party.

These two things are completely opposed.

If the system facilitates everyone who wants to deal with it on Blockchain, then the cost of people to verify all these transactions increases significantly, forcing most people to trust a third party that can afford these costs. If the system maintains a low cost to verify the participants, then it cannot effectively deal with the cost on Blockchain.

So we will expand bitcoin with layer 2, right? But what does that mean? I am sure that most people who read this hear the word scaling and immediately think about transactions per second. The more transactions that we can do with Bitcoin origin in the second, the more our size, right?

I would like to argue. This is a huge element from it, but this is not the only thing we are trying to expand its scope. We are trying to expand the important characteristics of Bitcoin as a control -resistant system. If we do not care about this aspect of scaling, we can actually call it a day. We have exchanges, banks, and other central guards.

trust

We want the solutions that we build for the productivity of expansion to maintain confidence. Users should not rely on the sincerity of another party in order to ensure the security of their money. In some restrictions, users must have the ability to ensure ownership of their money while depending on the work of any party other than themselves.

This does not necessarily mean the same security model as Blockchain, that is, send your money to an address, then no other procedure is necessary to keep your keys safe. Users may need to stay online, or online access periodically within a specific time window, or storing data that cannot be renewed inevitably, but you should be able to ensure their money remains in its control.

Final settlement

Users need a high degree of certainty that the transactions they have made are final, and cannot be retracted. This is the entire basic function that Blockchain achieves in the system, processing treatment and guarantee of settlement finals.

Currently not class system 2 In reality It provides a final settlement outside the chain. What they provide is to guarantee a settlement by a third party, such as the union, guard, or system operator, or option To practice the settlement finals when the user wants in the form of pre -signed transactions.

The ideal theoretical layer system will provide permanently for the actual settlement itself outside the chain. Although this may not be actually possible, we must look for stronger settlement guarantees provided by third parties, and more flexible and effective designs for the final “options” in the form of one -sided exit plans for layer 2.

Assign

We must reduce the cost of users to use these systems. This is strongly related to the efficiency of the settlement finals. If the exercise of the final settlement option is expensive, users will choose the systems in which they delegate the final guarantees to third parties.

The cost of using Blockchain depends on the amount of data it requires. The higher the data, the higher the cost. Since Blockspace becomes more demanding and increased fees, users should be able to withstand the costs of practicing a final option.

LED requirements

All current layer 2S that already provides an option for the end of the settlement has a form of LIFIED requirements, that is, the user must remain online or communicate on the Internet periodically in order to ensure the characteristics of nature and the unreliable settlement of that layer 2.

Systems such as Lightning requires to be connected to the Internet all the time, use a third party to be online and Blockchain monitoring you, or clearly trust people who have open channels while not trying to steal your money with old countries. A system like ARK requires online check -in and your metal currency recycling because the ARK batch ends and the operator can sweep all the money.

The only way out of this is the mandate of the settlement finals and unreliable security to a third party. We need to reduce Li -ivious requirements as much as possible for the systems that do no Delegate control to a third party.

Put everything together

Only after we think about these characteristics that we want to keep while expanding the scope of productivity, we can already start thinking about the required functions in the bitcoin protocol itself to facilitate this scaling.

In order for the current layer 2 to be unreliable, the users themselves must participate in delegating balance updates outside the chain. This requires users to interact with each other to agree to updates. Obviously, any OPCODE symbol or a change to Bitcoin would allow users to interact with each other more efficiently and quickly in pre -design to impose settlement finals will be useful to maintain confidence during scaling.

To go further, the OPCODE code that allowed part of UTXO freely by a certified user can be used, but the rest of the balance has been restricted and can only be accessed for other users, can maintain confidence while eliminating the need for users to coordinate both at all, or reduces the need for the starting point for the protocol.

Thinking about the end result we want, in specific phrases of the required characteristics that we want, is what is necessary to expand the scope of this protocol in a long -term way. Only then we can back away from a step back and think about the concrete job that the final result will need at the technical level.

To expand bitcoin is more than just increasing the number of transactions that can be processed per second. We can do it now with the guardian. To expand Bitcoin is an increase in the number of transactions that can occur without confidence, with control -resistant finals, without exhausting requirements than Litiving on the user, and for a cost of a larger group of users can afford its costs.

If we cannot expand the scope of these properties, Bitcoin has not already been limited, regardless of the number of transactions that occur with Bitcoin origin.