OK, that makes sense. But isn't that still the same as Bitcoin in 2009/10/11 where Satoshi and later Gavin had control over commit privileges? The protocol change for sidechains is one time, after that the 5 guys in Blockstream have limited influence.
What this does is to decentralize implementation of new features. Today you have to go through a small number of people to get a commit accepted. With sidechains anyone can implement a new feature and the community can choose which to adopt. This puts the power to extend features directly in the hands of the community and out of the hands of the few commiters of today. This is decentralized implementation of features, which has tremendous potential benefits.
It seems if you are worried about today's situation where only a few people have commit privileges and have too much influence over new features, then sidechains address that worry by removing power from these few people.
It seems another fear is SC's causing the main Bitcoin chain to become stagnate and thus unused over time, damaging the network. I guess I just see this as an upgrade path. If everyone switches to a SC, that SC because the main chain. The 21M ledger is still intact.
And it's actually a better upgrade path from today. Again today those 5 guys with commit privileges can push us all to upgrade. With SC's the upgrade is completely voluntary for individuals to move, everyone can decide on their own when they feel ready to move.
the way i understand the github process is that while you may be able to put patches up there freely, nothing can be written to the source code w/o consensus from the core devs themselves. b/c the vast majority of them now work in one company, there is a potential for them to possibly insert what they want and definitely to block what they don't want.
Your understanding of the process is the same as mine.
But again, isn't this the case today? What's different from today. At least with SC's you can implement new features outside of the centralized process we have currently (which I do not like).
JR has asked the question about technology that might obsolete the need for SC's and how that might get blocked. he doesn't think his question got answered satisfactorily. it is a potential problem that the community needs to address and talk about as it does have real world implications if abused. they're basically saying "trust us". it's up to you.
If there is strong demand, I don't think they can block SC alternatives. In Linux committers have a lot of control over their pieces, but it's not infinite by any means.
And again Blockstream does not have any control over sidechains where adoption of sidechains guarantees them money in any sort of way. We might find Blockstream has disappeared in a year and the 5 people mentioned above are now advocating for a SC alternative.
I think you bring up an important point which is "
is this version of sidechains the best or are there potentially other solutions that are better". The reason this is important is once we have one version implemented, the preference will be to stick with the current version even if something better comes along later. So, we should make sure we implement the right technology first. That's a bigger sticking point for me.
