Building Consensus or “Kicking the Can down the Road”? – Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong Showcases Core BIPsThe Hong Kong version of the Scaling Bitcoin workshop fulfilled its promise of delivering content from the leading developers in the Bitcoin Ecosystem. Although the bitcoin block size debate has been very adversarial, the spirit of the conference seemed more collaborative with occasionally heated, constructive debate over scaling the bitcoin network. We will ultimately have to wait to see if this translates to real consensus of bitcoin’s future.
On the first day, Adam Back, the President of Blockstream – a sponsor of the event, discussed fungibility in the context of scalability of bitcoin. Fungibility is when coins are equal and interchangeable, and a key property of any electronic cash system.
Back covered the positive as well as negative aspects of introducing fungibility mechanisms. Such fungibility mechanisms can increase the number of transactions or the size of the transactions. Some mechanisms also increase the degree of unspent transaction output (UTXO) as a side effect, which is really undesirable for the node size or scalability.
Back discussed the various tradeoffs of such mechanisms as CoinJoin, confidential transactions, linkable ring signatures, Zerocoin and Zerocash protocols, and “encrypted transactions” or “committed transactions.”
Back appears to like the last two examples. He said this:
http://allcoinsnews.com/2015/12/07/building-consensus-or-kicking-the-can-down-the-road-scaling-bitcoin-hong-kong-showcases-core-bips/
