Topic: Sidechain protocol creating an addressable "Internet of Blockchains" for scaling (Read 508 times)

i have to say, sidechains absolutely baffle me, but they sound like a really interesting solution to a few problems that i have heard about.  cant wait to see what the next few years hold for bitcoin. 

my reply about the limited amount of 'wings' was due purely to your own example of aa9. i understand your still 'tweaking your concept' so obviously your examples are not carved in stone. i just purely replied on the current vision/example you had at the time of writing.
as for using ip addresses or other namespaces, how you identify one chain from another still keeps the analogy of bank branches (branches of tree) relevant. i didnt mean it to be specifically a banking sortcod/routing number, much like i presume your identification to be set in stone as 3 hex digits. but used just as examples.

sounds similar to the IMF's hyper ledger concept.
regional chains (brics, amero) then sub chains below that for dollar, pound, euro, ruble, yuan

i understand this. but on the link you envisioned people mining the childchains(wings).
your proposing to move coins over to angel.. even you say bitcoin can then be abandoned. and your concept probably wants to be running far before 2140.
but the reality is that its not moving coins across. its about locking bitcoins on the bitcoin side and create an alt 1:1 on the angel wing side, with in some form, something storing bitcoins privkeys to the real bitcoins on bitcoins chain... to allow for unlocks should users want to return.. thus revealing the weakness.
so while users are playing with the altcoins there is also bitcoins(locked). which is a way of dismantling bitcoins 21m cap. because while there are 21m coins on the bitcoin network now there are extra coins on angel that also suppose to be bitcoins.
this is the same issue if bitcoin was the top of the tree (forking bitcoin to become the angel) and then had sub networks..
this is the same issue if the coins of wing:aa9 are locked to then play around on wing:fff
unless you found a way to completely obliterate a bitcoin on the bitcoin network(not advisable) to then use that proof of obliteration to then create the alt. there will be the weakness of abuse by wherever/whoever has the privkey for the bitcoin locked funds. to unlock them while the user is playing with the altcoin.

i understand what you meant and ran scenarios in my head when thinking about your concept. my 'issue' was that when users lock their bitcoins to play with the angel wing coins(altcoins) angel has the privkeys of bitcoin addresses to unlock bitcoins while users are still playing with angelwing coins.
it was not about double spending angelwingcoin aa9 with angelwingcoin fff. it was about the bitcoin<->angel lock/swap. where the bitcoin privkeys needed to be stored somewhere. it was not about the internal code of angel. but the bitcoin side. where privkeys are needed

there are privkeys. on the bitcoin side..

bitcoin has private keys. transactions need to be signed by whoever owns the private key.. it is not about the inner workings of angel. its about the side of bitcoin where private keys are needed to lock and unlock funds. obviously they have to be stored and managed... just like LN.
however LN doesnt magic up new coins. the 'balance' stays the same.

however creating wings where bitcoins on the bitcoin network are locked to then create altcoin out of nothing on the wing. while the bitcoins remain in some address that someone has access to. (because ofcourse people may want to get back to bitcoin) thus requires a private key to move funds out of the lock.. leaves a weakness in regards to abuse of unlocking funds while users play with the alt

that last point is the most crucial of all because it leaves the weakness of obliterating the 21m cap if someone was to double spend the bitcoin and also play around with the equal angelwingaa9 coin to spend that coin too..

a safer option is to have it as a separate network and let people 'buy' the angel alt, however i see you would not like that as you want to peg these new alts at the same price as bitcoin 1:1, which 'buying' wont achieve because it wont get you the 1:1 value you want.

i think your concept is not as elegant as you see it, and has more weaknesses than benefits.

i do see some positives, dont get me wrong. such as american users only needing to hold transaction data in their node for american users instead of the whole worlds data.

but you need to really work on the weaknesses,
premiss or killing off bitcoin to make angel the new reserve currency far sooner then the 2140 example you gave
coin creation and ability to unlock bitcoins while the altcoins exist.
the dilution of miners away from bitcoin to protect their regional wing. thus making bitcoin less secure.

as i said your concept has more merit running as its own separate alt which (i think your hoping) will be the new international reserve that overtakes/replaces bitcoin. but trying to peg it to bitcoin. has flaws

lol you were.
i was calling lightning network an implementation of multisigs.

I wouldn't waste your time with Franky, pondjohn, he's only interested in making false assertions about Bitcoin development that correspond to his paymaster's wishes to disrupt/control/manipulate Bitcoin management. Franky was calling the Lightning Network a "side-chain alt-coin" a few months ago, for example.

That's not how I visioned it.

Less like a bank routing/sort code, more like IP addresses. There is a huge addressable space, however I imagine the market would form consensus around a far far small number of blockchains. IPv6 has an addressable space higher than there are atoms on planet earth, its just better to have an abundance of addressable space than end up with another IPv4. A large addressable space enables a free market where anybody can create a blockchain, but does not make higher numbers of blockchains more viable. There isn't a finite capacity, which would lead to centralisation.

Perhaps the direct children of Angel would be regional, with a main blockchain for Europe, Asia, and then sub blockchains. Each of which has children with higher volumes but more specific use cases. The higher up the tree you go, hashpower is always the sum of all children... security is a tradeoff at the lower levels, but there is no solution that allows blockchains to scale (on chain) without a security tradeoff. The more you pay, the higher the security.

With regards to the incentive to no longer mine the main Bitcoin blockchain, you could have a fee at each level that passes up say 20% of fees right the way to the Angel. This money pools together, and for every merge mined block, the miner gets all that Bitcoin in reward, so merge mining the main chain is rewarded.


With a hard fork to Bitcoin, the entire system could be merge mined together, which would actually increase security of Bitcoin. In a PoW tree structure, there is no loss of overall network security, there is just more choice where a user can decide to have less security at a lower cost. You can just distribute and scale the PoW more effectively.


It's not to push at all. If it offers a better system at a lower price, people will take their coins into it. We need to solve the problem of on chain scaling, sidechains are happening however we implement them. In 2140, when there are no more coinbase transactions, it is entirely possible that all coins will have been moved away from the main blockchain to something more versatile and it will be abandoned. That is not a problem, and it is not something to trouble ourselves with now.


The tree structure (where parents are aware of, but not synchronised with children), allows us to do some cool things with security.

The biggest risk is trying to spend on a child blockchain, and then creating a withdraw transaction on a parent so you keep the coins (double spend).

Children synchronise all parents, so if anybody mines a block that is a double spend, the children will see it immediately. They can then broadcast proof of the double spend to all parent nodes, and miners will not build on that block. This allows you to effectively gain additional security from a parent, without additional cost.

Children always follow parents, so if a parent chain reorganises, so do the children. This prevents inconsistencies.


I don't know how you think the system is being managed by middmen? The gateway is completely decentralised and has no middle men. It is just an unmanaged protocol that nobody has any control over. There are no private keys, no IMF.

Sidechains are still free to have a direct relationship with the main blockchain, and ignore the system, its just that the system facilitates a huge ecosystem and network and all participants benefit, so they'd be silly not to.

It is not a more "dangerous" idea than lightning network, you're comparing apples with oranges. It is an entirely different system, lightning networks are better for day to day payments. This enables something more like Ethereum, a Turing complete machine (or every and any type of blockchain).

however. there is nothing stopping you from programming it as its own stand alone coin, which allows users to come together using multisigs/contracts to create branches and run their own sub-chains/wings.

and then let the market decide if its better.
instead of trying to attach it directly to bitcoin to dilute bitcoins security and utility, in one swoop of making your altcoin the new international reserve.

not really.

a side chain still is a chain. still has to store data. but i see the concept you are thinking of.
if you want to be a full node. yes you can shut down your bitcoin node and then run an angel branch/wing:aa9 node that only amounts to storing/validating 0.0244% of transactions due to there being 4096(im presuming by the aa9 hex example) branches/wings(altcoin) of angel.

what you are proposing is that Angel is becomes the 'reserve currency' like the IMF bank and each 'child' blockchain/wing is a bank branch, each with its own sortcode/routing number(aa9).

the end result is when people lock bitcoins, to play with altcoin aa9. they no longer need to run a bitcoin node and miners no longer need to mine bitcoin because they are then "spending" and protecting their value on a IMF(angel) bank branch/wing: aa9. and if that branch/wing chain is a public chain it will only be protected by the 'users' in that branch/wing. which is far LESS secure than everyone concentrating the entire hashpower on just one chain.

thus voiding hash power/difficulty away from bitcoin and then diluting that hashpower/difficulty by splitting it up into different and separate branches. because bitcoin becomes the unused leaf at the edge of the angel tree.

this idea seems a way to just push everyone onto a new ALTCOIN called angel and then technically onto many altcoins called angel:000-fff and slowly make bitcoin die when less people are playing with bitcoin due to their coins being locked.

the issue i see is that the 'branch managers' then has all the private keys to unlock the bitcoins while the customers are playing with the aa9 chain.
causing replay attacks(double spending via 2 different coins) as there needs to be a privkey somewhere to unlock coins if people wish to return.
(that issue alone of 'who/how the privkeys are managed' needs a solution, before anything else to make the concept viable)
the issue i see is that the rarity/production cap is then evaporated.
the issue i see is that users then have to trust middlemen creating new altcoins.
the issue i see is sending funds to people in different branches becomes that bit more complicated due to not transacting in just 1 chain

this essentially is a more dangerous idea than LN. because:
LN doesnt impact bitcoins security of hashpower and difficulty as much, if anything.
LN doesnt impact the rarity/deflationary production cap

as i said. all i can see is how the OP wants to 'manage' the next International monetary Fund(angel) and rule the roost, by inventing new bank branches beneath it and causing bitcoin to get down graded into just a small communities insecure credit union. because bitcoin would no longer be at the centre:


we should however be thinking about protecting and expanding bitcoin to remain 'unmanaged' by middlemen to become the new IMF, where bitcoin remains the gateway in and out of all altcoins

Sidechains seem an inevitable tool for scaling. They allow Bitcoins to be transferred from the main blockchain into external blockchains, of which there can be any number with radically different approaches.

In current thinking I have encountered, sidechains are isolated from each other. To move Bitcoin between them would involve a slow transfer back to the mainchain, and then out again to a different sidechain.

Could we instead create a protocol for addressable blockchains, all using a shared proof of work, which effectively acts as an Internet of Blockchains?

Instead of transferring Bitcoin into individual sidechains, you move them into the master sidechain, which I'll call Angel. The Angel blockchain sits at the top of of a tree of blockchains, each of which can have radically different properties, but are all able to transfer Bitcoin and data between each other using a standardised protocol.

Each blockchain has its own address, much like an IP address. The Angel blockchain acts as a registrar, a public record of every blockchain and its properties. Creating a blockchain is as simple as getting a createBlockchain transaction included in an Angel block, with details of parameters such as block creation time, block size limit, etc.

Mining in Angel uses a standardised format, creating hashes which allow all different blockchains to contribute to the same Angel proof of work. Miners must hash the address of the blockchain they are mining, and if they mine a hash of sufficient difficulty for that blockchain they are able to create a block.

Blockchains can have child blockchains, so a child of Angel might have the address aa9, and a child of aa9 might have the address aa9:e4d. The lower down the tree you go, the lower the security, but the lower the transaction fees. If a miner on a lower level produces a hash of sufficient difficulty, they can use it on any parents, up to and including the Angel blockchain, and claim fees on each.

There are so many conflicting visions for how to scale Bitcoin. Angel allows the free market to decide which approaches are successful, and for complementary blockchains with different use cases, such as privacy, or high transaction volume, to more seamlessly exist alongside each other, using Bitcoin as the standard currency.

I wrote this as a TLDR summary for a (still evolving) idea I had on the best approach to scale Bitcoin infinitely. I've written more of my thoughts on the idea at https://seebitcoin.com/2016/09/introducing-buzz-a-turing-complete-concept-for-scaling-bitcoin-to-infinity-and-beyond/

Does anybody think this would be a better, more efficient way of implementing sidechains? It allows infinite scaling, and standardisation allows better pooling of resources.