[runeks]

> Maybe there's a happy medium where trustworthiness of central authorities is appropriately distributed, but common operations are quicker and less wasteful.

I’m working on this. It’s an implementation of a protocol called Stroem, which uses payment channels to transfer bitcoins from consumers to so-called issuers, who issue payments in exchange which consumers then send to merchants. Then merchants collect these off-chain payments from issuers, and redeem them into bitcoins on the blockchain when they wish.

This system compromises with the security of the payment receivers only (the merchants). Everything is trustlessness for the payment sender/consumer, while merchants need to trust issuers. But, if desired, the merchant-issuer trust can be reduced to almost nothing by the merchant redeeming very often (at the cost of higher fees).

And, importantly, the open nature of the protocol will ensure competition between issuers, since anyone can join the network.