On 3/4/2022 7:35 AM, Billy Tetrud wrote:
sidechains cannot exist without their mainchain ...
A sidechain could stop supporting deposits from or withdrawals to
bitcoin and completely break any relationship with the main chain.
I agree this is not as sure of a thing as starting with an altcoin
(which of course never has that kind of relationship with bitcoin).
So I do think there are some merits to sidechains in your scenario.
However, I don't think its quite accurate to say it completely
solves the problem (of a less-secure altcoin becoming dominant).
It is hard to see how this "sidechain cuts off the mainchain" scenario
could plausibly be in enough people's interest:
* Miners would lose the block subsidy (ie, the 6.25 BTC, or whatever of
it that still remains), and txn fees from the mainchain and all other
merged mined chains.
* Developers would lose the ability to create a dissenting new piece of
software (and would instead be forced into a permanent USSR-style "one
party system" intellectual monoculture).
* Users would lose --permanently-- the ability to take their coins to
new blockchains, removing almost all of their leverage.
Furthermore, because sidechains cannot exist without their parent (but
not vice-versa), we can expect a large permanent interest in keeping
mainchain node costs low. Aka: very small mainchain blocks forever. So,
the shut-it-down mainchain-haters, would have to meet the question "why
not just leave things the way they are?". And the cheaper the
mainchain-nodes are, the harder that question is to answer.
However, if a sidechain really were so overwhelmingly popular as to
clear all of these hurdles, then I would first want to understand why it
is so popular. Maybe it is a good thing and we should cheer it on.
Your anecdote about not running a full node is amusing, and I've often
found myself in that position. I certainly agree different people are
different and so different trade offs can be better for different
people. However, the question is: what tradeoffs does a largeblock
sidechain do better than both eg Visa and lightning?
Yes, that's true. There are very many tradeoffs in general:
1. Onboarding
2. Route Capacity / Payment Limits
3. Failed Payments
4. Speed of Payment
5. Receive while offline / need for interaction/monitoring/watchtowers
6. Micropayments
7. Types of fees charged, and for what
8. Contribution to layer1 security budget
9. Auditability (re: large organizations) / general complexity
LN is certainly better for 4 and 6. But everything else is probably up
for grabs. And this is not intended to be an exhaustive list. I just
made it up now.
(And, if the layer2 is harmless, then its existence can be justified via
one single net benefit, for some users, somewhere on the tradeoff-list.)
Paul
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