Topic: [2017-06-14] Bitcoin Scaling: How to Give Everyone More Control (Read 2519 times)

The approach of this article - to give a sidechain to each faction of the "scaling war" - seems interesting at a first glance. And I fully support the Drivechain proposal which would make almost trustless sidechains possible.

But I think there is a problem to solve: miner rewards. Pegged sidechains simply cannot have a regular block reward mechanism because otherwise there would not be anymore an 1:1 peg every time a block is generated. So all miners of the sidechain can hope for is transaction fees.

The consequence could be that, in the case both parties are still hostile to each other, the war about the solution that powers the main chain would continue: Because only there, block rewards can be won, miners would continue to mine the main chain, even if they also merge-mine their "big block" sidechain. And so they could continue to block soft forks if they want.

Additionally, if the hostilities between both groups do not cease, I think that above all a possible "Core sidechain" with Segwit and small blocks would be in danger of being attacked by the "anti-Core faction".

At the end, I think nevertheless the proposal is an interesting one. But it requires some level of agreement between both parties to be not totally hostile to each other. And it requires the miners to accept to limit their "control" to the sidechain.

Politics has gripped bitcoin – it's about the only thing people have been wanting to talk about for the past few years.

I've written before about how the bitcoin ecosystem is like the three branches of government, with developers being the legislative branch, miners serving as the executive branch and users being the judicial branch. I've also written about how bitcoin changes through consensus, and how consensus is not supposed to be easy.

In this article, I examine an alternative path to the current political stalemate and how that can help empower developers, miners and users.

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