Side chains per se, do not solve all the problems Bitcoin has today, nor are they a guarantee of anything.
What they are is a mechanism. They may have the potential to solve problems. That will depend entirely on what people do with them. They are another tool in the tool belt. It can be used to build or destroy. The existence of this mechanism does not guarantee the success of Bitcoin. It would be nice if it did, and we could all just sit back and wait for the magic to happen.
I completely agree, I'm sorry if I used a worse wording, I think the problem is I'm not a native English speaker and this has effects
Instead there is a new tool, a new mechanism. It may be used by all sorts of people, and groups. This is great, it is the nature of open source collaboration. However we must recognize that only some people may share common goals with you or me, and others may not. And you may not know whether any particular SC creator does or doesn't. There may be wolves in alpaca clothing.
Again, I agree... and "wolves in alpaca clothing" is
fantastic I'll take this expression as mine henceforth, if you don't mind
These are the sorts of things that I (and presumably CypherDoc and others) consider with caution. What makes this even more of a concern is when we see these posts that essentially say "there is nothing to worry about", "this fixes everything" or "the details of the cryptography don't matter".
Those sort of statements are either (a) just misunderstood word choices (and something else was meant by the author), or (b) maybe the author is simply misguided or exuberant , or (c) perhaps they may be malicious attempts to misguide others.
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What you wrote here below is sensible. We may disagree on some matters of preference, but I like that you say what side chains "can" do rather than what they "will" do. It is important to understand that they can be used and also can be abused.
Again, I completely agree.
The problem is that while I understand they can be abused, I also understand that the problem they can create is one of these two types:
1) an altcoin. Yes, that can be a problem, but it's not a different problem than the one we have right now.
2) a service that fails. Let's remember that a 2wp sidechain is a service completely analogous to the one offered today by a coinbase or a mtgox. We know they can add value to the network, and we know they can fail bringing enormous problems to their users,
but they can't harm bitcoin, the network. That's why I consider SC an improvement to the actual situation, and it's because we have an algorithm to programmatically move coins between the chain.
And that movement can be done
without requesting permission.
That's not a minor improvement: that's the difference between day and night, and one that can solve a lot of problems, like for example the fractional reserve of mtgox.
I think Cypherdoc is understanding the function and capabilities pretty well. I also think his caution is reasonable.
I agree that caution is reasonable, and I'm eager to understand the failure cases, but simply I don't find any evidence, not from cypherdoc, in any case.