Author: ZmnSCPxj 2021-09-02 21:02:55
Published on: 2021-09-02T21:02:55+00:00
The context discusses the difference between federated sidechains and Drivechains. Federated sidechains are custodial with a fixed signing set, and the federation can abscond with the funds completely. On the other hand, Drivechain custody is held by mainchain miners. However, sidechain funds can be confiscated by a 51% attacker, which leads to slower sidechain->mainchin withdrawals, effectively creating a bottleneck on how much can be transferred sidechain->mainchain. Against 51% attack confiscation, Paul Sztorc proposes a "nuclear option" where mainchain full nodes are upgraded to ignore historical blocks created by the 51% attacker. If sidechains are for prototyping new features, then it's better to create a federation that runs the sidechain so you can tinker on new features with friends. There is no real need to use a big, inefficient data structure like blockchain; in fact, in a 2-of-2 federation, there are only two members, so a lot of the blockchain overhead can be reduced to just a bunch of fairly simple protocol messages you send to each other. That is just Lightning Network.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T01:26:46.668109+00:00