Ciphrex CEO and Bitcoin Core Contributor Eric Lombrozo gave what was perhaps the most in-depth talk at the recent Blockchain Agenda Conference in San Diego . While most of the other presentations and panel discussions focused on topics such as regulation and disruption of traditional financial institutions, Lombrozo’s talk mainly focused on the technical side of things. In particular, the highly-experienced information security specialist spoke about the possibilities for scaling Bitcoin to many more users in the near future.
During his presentation, Lombrozo covered three key options for scalability that could eventually allow the network to handle much wider adoption of the digital cash system. Although all of the attention has been on a potential increase in the block-size limit over the past year, Lombrozo did not discuss this potential change to the Bitcoin protocol.
More Efficient Cryptographic Proofs
Cryptographic proofs are not something usually discussed in the wider Bitcoin community, but Lombrozo believes that finding more efficient methods of proving some piece of knowledge via cryptography could be helpful for scalability. He explained:
“We need to think in terms of scripting systems which are optimized for efficient proofs. A lot of the computational problems are not really easily amenable to this kind of stuff, but luckily, a lot of the kinds of problems we’re interested in for these kinds of things do offer efficient proofs, which means it’s much easier to verify the proof than to construct the proof.”
It’s possible that this option for creating a more efficient Bitcoin network is not often discussed because it is quite technical, but MIT’s Madars Virza gave a talk on the topic at Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong. In his talk, Virza talked about the role of zero-knowledge proofs for Bitcoin scalability.
In Lombrozo’s presentation, he noted that some of the new breakthroughs in […]
