Topic: Bitcoin as its own sidechain! (Read 196 times)

To be clear: Re-thinking the pretty old, still not mature enough, sidechain proposal, I'm suggesting a model where both chains are (almost) identical in terms of rules, user experience, software suite, etc. It is strictly different with what has always been implied in discussions about this topic, where sidechains are always supposed to be a somewhat new, even experimental, blockchains which are (temporarily) charged with few bitcoins to play with very strict ways to burn the charged btc, paving the way for it to be reclaimed in the mainchain.

On the contrary, I'm proposing new instances of a full-fledged bitcoin fresh blockchain,  with very little modifications to be run as sidechains for the legacy blockchain. What would be the catch? Scaling.

Scaling isn't a problem in the cryptography domain to be solved by cryptographers, neither it is junior hackers' job to, it needs to be addressed in architecture space, well, primarily. A system without a scalable architecture fails to scale no matter how much cryptography or coding is The simple, innocent question I've put forward is a question of scalability because once bitcoin is launched in L2 nothing could stop the pattern from recurring in L3, L4, ... and even L0, L(-1), ... it will be just about the economy, grows with the economy, scales with it.

I hate this pegg-in, pegg-out talking point that people are stuck with for a decade with no even possible outcome. The same people who are deeply and overly concerned about miners colluding and stealing sidechain funds, ugh, can't help it to propose stupid alternative trust  mechanisms, mostly inspired by cryptographic tricks like what is employed in PoS (this is just a trick by the way, cryptography, isn't it?). It is sad, yet very interesting: the self-proclaimed bitcoin maximalist who abandons PoW as the unique trust mechanism in favor of stupid PoS like cryptographic proofs being zK or homomorphic or something tricky like that to move funds between the chains, absolutely nonsense.

No, thank you, please forget about pegging-in, hence don't be concerned about pegging-out, there is no such thing in bitcoin neither would be in its
sidechains as long as they are bitcoin too.

Yes, and it is one of many problems we are going to address with this architecture. Add to the list:
centralization of mining,
mass adoption,
speculative market dominance and the awful price fluctuations,
corrupt anti-PoW/anti-bitcoin advocacy,
...,
and the list goes on.

P.S.:
How is it then? Aren't you banned from this subforum, like permanently? Am I violating something now?

thats the analogy of sidejob vs main-career.  (sidechain vs mainnet)
which is where bitcoin becomes the less practical used network for daily use and daily income for miners/maintainers/devs/users

if enough btc is locked up on the bitcoin blockchain, to then use as reference utxo to open up a pegged unit of account on another network, where the majority of daily activity occurs on another network(chain or smartcontract).

then most users using that alt-network daily will be analysing/auditing/securing the other network more than concerning themselves with the bitcoin network. meaning their prospective is that the other network is the 'mainnet' and bitcoin is the sidechain that they dont need/use.

then yes bitcoin becomes the 'sidechain' and the other network becomes the mainet

there are talks about 'what to do when all btc block rewards deplete and miners have to rely on tx fee'.
some options were to do exactly like this topic suggests. lock coins up on the bitcoin network. peg them to an altnet. then everyone treats the altnet as bitcoin 2.0 where they then get income from performing tasks on the altnet via different means. which could be a different form of mining a chain. or getting commission from routing smart contracts

where by due to most btc being locked and not moving on the actual(original) bitcoin network, mining becomes less required as no one needs/wants to return to move things around on the original bitcoin network, thus bitcoin just becomes a fixed ledger that stops building blockheight, used purely as a UTXO record for the newly deemed mainnet of interest

LN is not a sidechain, AFAICT, but, I'm ok with labeling bitcoin (its blockchain to be more specific) as  Layer 1 hence its immediate  sidechains which are going down as Layer 2, Layer 3, and it is good labeling practice to name the immediate above side chain as  Layer 0, even going higher to Layer -1, Layer -2, etc.
My universe, is two-dimensional, you are free to put blockchains above or under bitcoin, it is an advanced topic, tho.

For now, the question is about the specifications and nature of these blockchains: Is it feasible and (more importantly) good practice to put another bitcoin above or a number of other bitcoins below the current bitcoin we have?

Take RSK for instance, it iss a sidechain below current bitcoin blockchain, it is merged mined with zero inflation, good, good, but it is following Ethereum's stupidity in terms of concepts, i.e., (wreckless)Turing Completeness and (too)Smart Contracts, besides a majority of its codebase. I just can't help it not to see the founders as being distracted and de-railed by misconceptions surrounding sidechains. Presumably, they have felt an obligation to comply with the idea of sidechains as some experimental, free to-do-anything or to-be-anything, whatsoever and decided to follow the trend.

I'm asking this question to relax sidechain development from such a prerequisite to be (or not to be) very different than bitcoin, from there we may be able to proceed to the next step: recursion.

Very thoughtful insights, as usual you bring meat to the table. Too advanced though, and I share two points, as a way of showing my appreciation.

1- Don't be obsessed with verification, blocks are not spontaneously mined by temporary miners. In practice there is a stream of blocks flawing from the same source, it suffices to have partial verifications constantly and full verifications, occasionally.

2- Using a recursive model realized in multi layers, grown up and down the reference blockchain, each chain is in charge of maintaining its own blockchain and (pruned versions) of the ancestors (not the descendants) it is how the overhead  can be afforded.

The key is recursion, where scaling and decentralization converge.

Do you mean Layer Zero? Because normally, Bitcoin is the Layer One, LN is the Layer One and a Half, and typical sidechains or federations, are on the Layer Two. Because the Layer Zero would mean the layer above the mainchain, where the currently existing chain would contain more things (exactly in the same way as LN or typical sidechains contain more transactions, that are finalized on-chain in some batched form). The idea behind that is simple: if sidechains are good, and if they have some nice properties, then what would happen if the existing Bitcoin blockchain would be treated as the sidechain of some other chain?

I thought about something like that, based on block headers, as a way to decentralize mining, but the main problem is to get the right performance. Because obviously, receiving all blocks from all miners would work in theory, but may not turn out well in practice. On the other hand, lazy verification is also an option, and could be considered as a some kind of shield from the 51% attacks: if the honest miners own only 10% of the total mining power, then they should receive only 10% of those coins, and the rest should be treated as unspendable/frozen in such model, exactly in the same way as invalid signatures are rejected. In this way, the heaviest chain of Proof of Work is always traced, but only the heaviest valid chain is spendable, it is only about being aware of the potential attackers, and burning/locking some coins, to have rewards, proportional to the total work.

Hello everyone,
Historically, in the main and trending bitcoin literature, the idea of sidechains have been shifted from a scaling solution to a testbed recommendation, a sandbox for experimenting weird ideas. It happened mostly because, the same guys who pioneered the original idea, somehow abandoned it as a scaling solution and focused on LN for this purpose, which is not a blockchain technology, after all. They have stressed enough on testbed and sandbox properties of a sidechain as an advantage, from the first day, so they have their own excuse for the shift, I don't buy it, TBH, but it is ok, not here to put fingers and making accusations, I'm just exploring the field and sharing ideas with forum members, whenever there is something with a merit.

Just a few hours ago, this was posted in a bitcoin-dev discussion thread:
which reminded me of this "sidechain as scaling solution vs testbed" controversy, encouraging me to change some plans, sharing this idea, as I'm a believer in literature and discourse and their impact on everything including technical developments.

As a matter of fact, sidechain related ideas and constructs are building blocks of a frameork that I'm working on (to be shared as well, very soon, I hope). The interesting point about this framework is that the sidechains under consideration are essentially nothing other than standalone instances of the original bitcoin! No disruptive new feature (not even the notorious covenants support ), nothing other than some glues, suture, cesors,etc. I mean few protocol stuff and features for interactions and relaxation of constraints suchas being backward compatible with old technologies and so fort, still, nothing other than our Plain Old Bitcoin, essentially. I'm not a genius, you know, just a regular person who is obsessed with integrating and things using glues.  

So, how is that impressive, fellas? The idea of using bitcoin as its own sidechain?