i've already went thru that one early on in the 200 pgs +.  but i lol'd at the name    reminded me of a billiard shot.

but i here ya and i expect you to be trolled hard as i was for that one.

I'm sorry but you have sorely misunderstood the gist of the comment in the link you posted. Worse, you mistakingly figured it would support your arguments.

Merged-mining, the way it was described in this comment, is essentally supporting multiple competing currencies : altcoins

Now sidechains, as I hope you have come to understand from our discussions, do not enable altcoins in any significant way.

Why do you think Truthcoin is a scam? I would love to see a decentralized prediction market.

The primary use case of sidechains is not to bootstrap altcoins on top of them.

In fact, to most of the Blockstream developers (from comments read), this mere notion is absurd. Sidechains were not created to "go to war & destroy" altcoins as you might like to think. In reality, altcoins are simply made irrelevant.

While you seem to have problem with "devs dev-ing" this is what they do : use technology to improve processes. Did the Blockstream guys dislike scammy alts? Of course, everyone does. Did they find important to leverage altcoins' innovation to improve the Bitcoin ecosystem? My opinion is this is the idea here.

Seen this yet?

https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/alts.pdf


lol.

That's Andrew Poelstra's "A Treatise on Altcoins". He's even harsher than many of us in this thread! He's also listed as an author on the sidechains whitepaper.

This theory is blatantly ignorant of network effect. This is another reason why I found it strange for you to pull this one up from the 2012 cementary where it belong.. You do realize this guy is the 2012 version of you Essentially, his proposition is that because of merged-mining, Bitcoins' competing currencies will leverage the security of the network and create a race to the bottom for the most "cost-effective" currency.

Well it's been almost 3 years now and there has been no sign of his theory being proven right. Additionally, Bitcoin's network effect has been growing along, making it even less probable.

Basically the idea is that you assemble a Namecoin block and hash it, and then insert that hash into a Bitcoin block. Now when you solve the Bitcoin block at a difficulty level greater to or equal to the Namecoin difficulty level, it will be proof that that amount of work has been done for the Namecoin block. The Namecoin protocol has been altered to accept a Bitcoin block (solved at or above the Namecoin difficulty level) containing a hash of a Namecoin block as proof of work for the Namecoin block. The Bitcoin block will only be acceptable to the Bitcoin network if it is at the difficulty of the Bitcoin network.

The Bitcoin block chain gets a single extra hash when a merged mining block is accepted, and the Namecoin block chain gets a little bit more (because it includes the Bitcoin block) when a merged mining block is accepted. However, because of the Merkle Tree, the entire Bitcoin block doesn’t need to be included in the Namecoin tree, just the top level hashes (so the extra bloat to the Namecoin chain is not a big problem).

Since you make more money mining both Namecoins and Bitcoins miners will eventually all do merged mining, and the difficulty level for all block chains will eventually be the same.

Furthermore, the economic incentive to mine will be the combined economic incentive of all networks, making all networks more secure. Of course this allows competing networks (with different inflation rates) to quickly become secure. This subjects Bitcoin to more competition.

Ultimately the value of Bitcoin is a reflection of the need for Bitcoins to make exchanges. The more people using Bitcoin to make purchases, the more demand there is for Bitcoins, and the higher the price of Bitcoins goes. (Speculation also raises the price, but long term speculation is essentially a bet that the transactional demand for Bitcoin will increase in the future.) The higher the price, the higher the incentive to mine.

At any given time there is a certain amount of demand for a Bitcoin like currency to make transactions. That need doesn’t increase with more competition. That means that the transactional demand for Bitcoin is really the same as the transactional demand for all substantially similar forms of payment. As more currencies are competing to fill the same demand they actually reduce the demand for the other currencies as they become more widely used.

This means that ultimately, to the extent that currencies are interchangeable to end users, merged mining does not increase the overall security of the networks. The demand for currencies drives the price (and thus the value of the reward). Increased demand for any given currency results in decreased demand for others, lowering the incentive to mine for the other currencies. The total incentive is a function of total demand for all Bitcoin like currencies.

Except now competing currencies can market themselves as “as secure as Bitcoin but with lower transaction fees.” In other words there is a race to the bottom among competing currencies to offer the lowest transaction fees, because lowering the transaction fee doesn’t hurt the security of the network in comparison to the other merged mining networks. Users, following their own self interest, will adopt the currency with the lowest transaction fees as long as it has the same security of the competitors.

This will increase the price of the currency with the lowest transaction fee (because demand for the currency is higher), and decrease the price of the currencies with higher transactions fees (because demand for those currencies is dropping as it is being filled by demand for the competing currency). Because the currencies with the higher transaction fees were the ones generating the incentive to mine, overall incentive to mine will diminish. As long as a currency’s mining is merged with the freeloading currency, it will be powerless to increase incentives by imposing mandatory transaction fees.

The result will be a decrease in mining incentive, a decrease in mining, and ultimately all networks that allow merged mining will become insecure.

But you are assuming that there is an incremental demand for the scBTC, whatever its utility is. This is not necessarily the case.

You need someone to buy all those scBTC you want to dump for fiat.

Since BTC & scBTC price are correlated one does not need to buy scBTC to "ride your pump"

This is a very good explanation of why NL's speculative attack is not plausible although I disagree with you end argument that "utility" sidechains cannot take off.

Lower usage (than BTC) does not necessarily translate in no usage at all. That said, this effectively support Adrian's comments that SC with biggest network will discourage use of similarly featured/competing clones.

Oh, I see.  Laying prostrate before the Feds and explaining everything that is remotely associated with Bitcoin is a sufficiently imaginative strategy then?

I'll set my mind to imagining how that strategy will end up...thinking...Got it: 'Poorly'.

Say, you didn't get hooked up with CoinValidation with the expectation that your stash would be perma-cleared or something did you?  I know we've been through this before, but I cannot shake the whiff of something stinky going down here.  Sorry to ask.

So is there a peg or not?
Is it just "correlated" now?

Let's assume the SC has some feature or other, faster, more private, whatever it is doesn't matter, we can pick whichever one is most successful and has the most liquidity at the moment to take advantage of the time premium and do this.

seriously brg444, you have go me laughing so hard right now at your ludicrousy my wife thinks something is wrong.

i am literally in tears:

you will single handedly be held responsible for causing the SC concept to fail with all the negative publicity you're gonna create.