I think it is good for everyone. And everyone will vote with their money in the end. :-)

Lots of people think this.  Lots don't.  
Most of the people will just follow along with the majority authority, whether it is right or isn't right.

It may take a much longer time to find out whether it is or isn't good, than it takes for these decisions to be made, so there won't be any going back.


Smaller stakeholders may be more inclined to just say "hey its only an experiment, lets try it and see if it works".  It remains an important test (to me at least) whether the larger stakeholders would agree.

So our task is to show how it is safe, if we can.
We do this by analyzing the risks, not by pretending there aren't any.
This analysis is not yet begun.  We don't even have a good test proposal yet.

Has anyone else noticed that we have won a major, major concession from brg444 inadvertently?

For the first 150 pages or so of this debate he has argued that SC's are one and the same ledger as bitcoin. He had contorted that definition with terms like "extensions"  or "sub ledgers"  in his rush to defend Blockstream and SC's .

Now,  for the last 50  pages or so he has inadvertently given up that battle and now inexplicably agrees with with every argument I've used assuming that they are in fact different ledgers.  This is what happens when you're blindy  defending something based not on principle but emotion.

And that is a major victory. Certainly one worth pointing out. The different ledger theory is a major pillar of the objection against SC's due to their insecurity and potential for manipulation.  

I am only able to sample this thread lately due to time constraints so I apologize if my responses have already been covered.


But its not really separated is it?  The BTC unit remains on the mainchain, "locked", essentially backing the sidechain.  Its like paper gold being backed by phys, except that it impossible to hide naked paper.  As a one-time holder of phyz gold and silver, I imagine that you'd agree that problems with the paper are unlikely to significantly affect the actual gold in your vault, except perhaps by removing value that the paper conferred (that is, many people think that gold ETFs drove the rise due by opening a larger market, and of course that additional value also floated phys).


I would prefer the devs work independently too, but reality isn't perfect.  But again, the BTC are not "flowing off" the Bitcoin ledger... BTC is simply being used to transparently back another chain.


If there really will be 1000 entities who need sidechains, we now have 1000 additional uses for Bitcoin which will massively increase demand for coins and resulting in a huge price increase.  This is a great problem to have.

We already imagine that if Bitcoin gains a large pct of the world's txns, it may not scale, resulting in high txn fees, and therefore may end up being used mostly for large transfers.  In your 1000 entities scenario, the only difference is that instead of large opaque transfers (we don't know anything about the BTC transfer just that it happened), we can see that X coins moved from SC A to SC B.

But running a SC does have overhead and risk.  It seems obvious to me that companies will use the mainchain if possible (that is, it scales and can capture the transaction).

You can't stop innovation.  If in the SC future there will be 1000 sidechains backed with Bitcoin, in the non-SC future there will be 1000 altcoins, and Bitcoin's market cap will be 1000 times lower then it could have been.

yes, we have been through this, that's how thoroughly we've all picked this apart.  i think it's conceptually constipating to stop your view of what's happening at the SPVproof (spvp) border, as if those BTC's always remain on the MC.  no, it's much more illuminating and as a laxative to view the spvp as an offramp into another speculative asset (defined as anything other than BTC which is the only sound hard money) such as Cashcoin, Truthcoin, votecoin, stocks, bonds, prediction markets, anything else.  as well, your model implies that someday these have to just be unlocked on a journey back to mobile BTC.  not true, whatever emerges on the other side of the spvp may never come back as Bitcoin has been forever changed by the mere insertion of the spvp.  i think that mere insertion forever breaks the Bitcoin concept as Sound Money.  it's like throwing the front door of your cattle barn wide open.  at first, nothing happens.  but once the cattle realize they are no longer safe from wolves entering, they start wandering out until you eventually get a stampede.

see above.

brg444 has also changed his argument to "there will only be Blockstream creating 2 utility SC's to now there will be a bunch of Blockstream-like companies like Google, IBM producing SC's in droves".  i believe this new backpedaled theory is what will happen.  that's b/c the spvp has inserted a costless, riskless, backdoor offramp which breaks Bitcoin's hard money security and allows a siphoning of value to these 1000's of SC's as new speculative assets.

once we allow that offramp to be inserted into the source code, it's game over.

There are significant number of people who don't want the main chain to scale, for various reason.

Sidechains provide those people both with an argument against scaling the main chain, and it creates a group of people with a financial interest in preventing the main chain from adopting new features which might render particular sidechains less necessary.

The latter part wouldn't be such a big deal if Blockstream wasn't so closely connected with Bitcoin Core development.

that was an interesting video.  thx for sharing.

is the skiplist as described in the SC WP the same as SCIP?  doesn't sound like it.

Thanks Odalv, I've understood you think it's good, can you explain why you think it is good?

I for one dearly wish that Bitcoin would scale while retaining the distributed features which, to me, give Bitcoin it's strength.  Unfortunately wishing for something is a poor engineering strategy.

About all I see from the scale-up folks is 'it's so easy...just tweak max_block_size and we can do 20,000 transactions per second no problem because Moore's Law.'  Meanwhile as we get half way to the paltry 7 tps six years on, one's computer running a full node acts like it has a mining trojan.

So, demo some code which does a fraction of the wild numbers needed to support the world.  Also, for an actual convincing test, let an adversary run DPI and filtering between your test sites.

Ideally, I'd like to see a development roadmap for the protocol, with clearly-defined criteria for determining what goes in and what does not.

Unfortunately a prerequisite for that is a common agreement on goals.