Author: Anthony Towns 2022-02-24 06:53:05
Published on: 2022-02-24T06:53:05+00:00
A discussion on the enabling of Drivechains through Turing completeness was held among developers, which led to a rejection of Drivechains. The reasons for this rejection were that sidechain validators and mainchain miners may merge their businesses, leading to mainchain miners validating and committing to sidechain blocks, making sidechains on Drivechains a block size increase. Two possible claims were made about drivechains that could make them unattractive: funds deposited in them would be stolen because the majority of hash rate is not enforcing drivechain rules or that adding a drivechain is a "block size increase" where every full node and miner needs to do more work when validating a block. Drivechain advocates argue a third outcome is possible where a minority of hashrate can validate drivechain rules, preventing drivechain funds from being stolen. A key difference between tx-covenant based drivechains and bip300 drivechains is hashpower endorsement. If 50% of hashpower acks enforcement of a new drivechain (as required in bip300 for a new drivechain to exist at all), there's an implicit threat that any block proposing an incorrect withdrawal from that blockchain will have their block considered invalid and get reorged out. Removing that implicit threat changes the game theory substantially, resulting in a scorched earth scenario where someone attempts to steal and the legitimate owner gets into a bidding war, with most of the funds ending up going to miners in fees. Covenant-based drivechains would be roughly the same as bip300 drivechains if a majority of hashpower used software implementing specific rules.It was argued that adding dedicated consensus features for drivechains is a bad idea in the absence of widespread acceptance that drivechains are likely to work as designed and be a benefit to Bitcoin overall. However, individuals who want to risk their own funds by leaving their coins on an exchange or using lightning, eltoo, tumbling/coinjoin, payment pools, drivechains, or being #reckless in some other way, and are not asking for consensus changes, may do so.
Updated on: 2023-05-22T17:24:32.965664+00:00