Author: Paul Sztorc 2017-06-10 17:04:10
Published on: 2017-06-10T17:04:10+00:00
Paul Sztorc has sought feedback on his Drivechain technology from the Bitcoin community. The upgrade would have significant scaling implications as a sidechain can be added by soft fork and have its own block space, removing the blocksize limit from "the Bitcoin system". Users can move their BTC to such a network if they want LargeBlock bitcoin, which would mean their transactions will no longer have an impact on "Bitcoin Core". One objection raised was about what happens if a majority of BTC is moved to one sidechain and then that sidechain has some kind of problem. The Drivechain technology includes the relatively new concept of Blind Merged Mining (BMM), which allows SHA256^2 miners to merge-mine these "drivechains" even if these miners aren't running the actual sidechain software. The goal is to prevent sidechains from affecting the levelness of the mining "playing field". BMM is not required for drivechain, but it would address some of the last remaining concerns.The author is updating on the progress of the blind merged mining project. They have been working on the sidechain aspect of the project, which will handle reorganizations in a new way. The author has responded to objections raised by commenters, summarizing each one and responding to them. One possible solution to the objection raised about what happens if a majority of BTC is moved to one sidechain and then that sidechain has some kind of problem would be to cap the quantity of BTC that can be moved to each sidechain at x=10% or 210,000. Another point raised is that Bitcoin has always been the "money of principle", and we survived the MtGox announcement, in which ~850,000/12,400,000 = 6.85% of the total BTC was assumed to be stolen.The author then moves on to discuss ongoing confusion around three topics: speed, security, and antifragility. The author explains that atomic cross-chain swaps make transfers fast and that theft is unlikely due to added inconvenience for any sidechain thievery. Finally, they explain the importance of distinguishing between problems with a sidechain that negatively impact its parent chain versus those that only impact sidechain users. The latter type of problem is desirable because it allows for experimentation and failure.Paul also juxtaposes the recent "Scaling Compromise" proposal with Drivechain. The proposal involves immediately activating SegWit and then hard forking to double the non-witness blockspace to 2MB within 12 months. Comparatively, Drivechain is better for they do not require a hard fork and could almost immediately add any amount of extra block space (such as an 8 MB maxblocksize, which doubles every two years).
Updated on: 2023-06-12T02:11:27.040045+00:00