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Comment by Frogolocalypse | Hacker News Reader

There is no such thing as a trustless implementation of a light client. Funnily enough, it was one of the things Satoshi could never get to work.

What do you mean core? Core doesn't run my node. I do. If you can't convince the peers in bitcoin to run your node client, you don't have a solution. I know this, because I do run a node, and I am a peer in peer-to-peer cash. And I, personally, have rejected your scalability plans, because I, personally, being a peer in peer-to-peer cash, have rejected your node client. I was not happy with your security model, and therefore I, with all of the other bitcoin peers, rejected it. Which is why bitcoin remains bitcoin, and failed fork after failed fork attempts remain the failed fork attempts. Because you don't have enough peers willing to follow your consensus change.

Bitcoin nakamoto consensus in action. It is a beautiful thing.

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Satoshi never claimed that a "trustless implementation of a light client" is possible. The white paper explains that a light client still has to trust other nodes:

>>As such, the verification is reliable as long as honest nodes control the network, but is more vulnerable if the network is overpowered by an attacker. While network nodes can verify transactions for themselves, the simplified method can be fooled by an attacker's fabricated transactions for as long as the attacker can continue to overpower the network. One strategy to protect against this would be to accept alerts from network nodes when they detect an invalid block, prompting the user's software to download the full block and alerted transactions to confirm the inconsistency. Businesses that receive frequent payments will probably still want to run their own nodes for more independent security and quicker verification.

While you claim that light clients betray the vision of Satoshi, based on totally unsubstantiated claims about what Satoshi meant by a light client, that are contradicted by several pieces of evidence (e.g. Satoshi communicating with Mike Hearn about Hearn's implementation of the SPV light client concept, without once claiming that his implementation fell short of Satoshi's idea of a light client, and while continuing to promote light clients on Bitcoin talk, like in this instance: http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/345/), you promote a future where the vast majority of the world have zero control over their own wealth, because they can't economically control their own private keys.

You need a dictionary more than you need the white-paper :

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/peer

> one that is of equal standing with another : equal

If you aren't running a node, you're not equal, and therefore, by definition, not a peer.

You're totally ignoring my arguments. This is pretty much how every discussion with an advocate of 1-MB-block-Bitcoin and $100 transaction fees goes. It's bizarre.

People who wanted lower security in exchange for lower fees already got what they wanted with Bcash.

What problem do you have with people running the blockchain they prefer?

I feel you, you are correct btw.

Fees are in sat/wu not $.

I'm using $ as a unit of account because people have a frame of reference for it. Any real world value can be described as its dollar equivalent, and frequently is for understandability.

> One strategy to protect against this would be to accept alerts from network nodes when they detect an invalid block, prompting the user's software to download the full block and alerted transactions to confirm the inconsistency

This part of the white paper is broken. Satoshi was wrong. Accepting unverifiable "alerts" from network peers as a trigger for doing large amounts of computation is a significant DoS vulnerability.

For this sort of scheme to work you would have a small-to-transmit, easy-to-verify proof of the invalidity of a block. (Called a "fraud proof" among developers who have looked at this.) Bitcoin protocol as specified by Satoshi does not allow for the full range of fraud proofs necessary to support this sort of DoS-resistant lite node implementation.

He didn't give the strategy as a requirement for light wallets to actually work. He gave it as an example of making the security trade off better. Light wallets do work. To fool them you have to have to be able to 51% the network and sybil my node. Not likely, especially if my spv wallet is checking multiple sources, even over https.

No, I have to send a simple forged "alert" packet to cause you to download 1-4MB of block data plus additional dependent spend data of similar size from your peers, and lock up your CPU for an intensive amount of time doing signature verification and hash tree calculations only to find out the alert was incorrect. Meanwhile another spoofed peer sends another alert packet....

and then my wallet bans your peer and moves on. Not an issue

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