<div dir="ltr"><div><div>They aren't really so closely related as you are implying, since bitcoin is a trustlessly decentralized system. At present every participant needs to be able to validate the entire chain in order to be certain that their copy of the ledger state is correct, and miners need to be able to incrementally validate blocks in particularly short timeframes or else.<br><br></div>It is possible for a decentralized system like bitcoin to scale via distribution in a way that introduces minimal trust, for example by probabilistic validation and distribution of fraud proofs. However changes to bitcoin consensus rules (mostly soft-forks) are required in order to make this possible.<br><br></div>I don't want to discourage thinking about scaling bitcoin in such ways, as it is a viable medium term proposal. However right now with the bitcoin that exists today parallel distribution and decentralization are at odds with each other.<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Thomas Zander via bitcoin-dev <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org" target="_blank">bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span class="">On Thursday 30. July <a href="tel:2015%2018.07.40" value="+12015180740">2015 18.07.40</a> Thomas Zander via bitcoin-dev wrote:<br>
> Remember when we went from single-core CPUs to multi-core (and<br>
> hyperthreading)? Developers were saying it was useless because all apps<br>
> were still single-threaded. And now, 15 years later, there are fantastic<br>
> frameworks to make this easy.<br>
><br>
> Same will happen with distributed. Any assumption you wrote above is not<br>
> inherent in the technology.<br>
<br>
</span>My brain went a bit to fast (dinner was being served, she made me close the<br>
laptop...) and wrote distributed above while the topic is decentralized.<br>
Its not entirely wrong, even; Libraries or approaches that do distributed will<br>
be useful for decentralized systems. ;)<br>
<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
--<br>
Thomas Zander<br>
_______________________________________________<br>
bitcoin-dev mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org">bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org</a><br>
<a href="https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev</a><br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br></div>