Author: Tao Effect 2017-10-10 20:43:17
Published on: 2017-10-10T20:43:17+00:00
A proposal for a generic sharding protocol for all blockchains, including Bitcoin, has been put forward by Greg Slepak. The idea is fairly simple: users say "My coins on Chain A are going to be sent to Chain B", burn the coins on Chain A, and create a minting transaction on Chain B. Verification of the action is easily done by thin clients, nodes, and miners. Users' client software also knows where to look for the other coins. This proposal requires only minimal modification to the Bitcoin protocol as most of the verification is done client-side. It is fully decentralized, and there's no need to give ownership of coins to miners to achieve scalability. The proposal is similar in spirit to Interledger. In a discussion thread on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Paul Sztorc criticized Tao Effect's one-way peg proposal. Tao Effect responded that there was nothing preventing transfers back to the main chain and that it was a two-way peg. CryptAxe asked why Tao Effect's method wouldn't change the number of Bitcoins in existence, to which Tao Effect replied that it would not. James Hudon questioned the ethics of Tao Effect's proposal, stating that users effectively lose their money and then steal from the miners to gain it back. Tao Effect refused to respond to any more emails unless they were from core developers.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T21:39:54.385803+00:00