Author: Joachim Strömbergson 2020-01-13 18:06:17
Published on: 2020-01-13T18:06:17+00:00
The sender of an email to a Bitcoin development mailing list has proposed a new sidechain protocol called Coins. The proposal suggests the creation of a new token for each sidechain and the use of atomic swaps to exchange mainchain tokens with sidechain tokens. However, the author argues that this model is arbitrary and goes against Bitcoin's value proposition as it inflates the supply with a new token. They believe that the only interesting sidechain model is the theoretical one with a two-way peg with Bitcoin. Secondly, the security of the proposed system seems fragile as the validators come from locking of stake on the Bitcoin chain by nodes interested in a particular sidechain. This could be attacked easily if just stalled or censored for a long period of time just by a small investment from an attacker. The author argues that honest majority assumption should only be used where the scope is global, where it is very hard and very expensive to obtain the majority. The proposed protocol is designed for payments at scale and allows for arbitrary sidechain assets with minimal footprint within Bitcoin's blockchain. Feedback on the Coins proposal is appreciated.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T23:08:39.930509+00:00