Author: Paul Sztorc 2017-07-11 20:36:36
Published on: 2017-07-11T20:36:36+00:00
In an email exchange between Pieter Wuille and Chris Stewart regarding the scalability of drivechains/sidechains, Paul pointed out that Chris' view was taken out of context by Pieter. Chris had stated that if drivechains were successful, they should be viewed as the way to scale rather than hard forking the protocol. Pieter disagreed with this, stating that drivechains and earlier sidechain ideas were not a scalability improvement but rather just enabled users to opt-in for another security model. He added that in terms of validation cost to auditors, it was as bad as just a capacity increase on chain while simultaneously adding the extra risk of miners being able to vote to steal users' money. However, Paul argued that every point of contention introduced by Pieter applied to both drivechain-sourced capacity and hardfork-sourced capacity. The only true difference was the "extra risk of miners being able to vote to steal your money", which Paul believes is not a marginal risk since miners can already do so in the double-spend and ln-channel-theft contexts. Overall, Paul suggested that the "risk" is actually desirable in an opt-in context because it puts the burden of proof on miners/developers to convince users to move over to the sidechain. Users would only opt-in if they felt sufficiently compensated for any and all risks.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T03:33:27.588519+00:00