Quote from: justusranvier on January 01, 2015, 04:20:06 PM

Quote from: adam3us on January 01, 2015, 02:56:19 PM

One of the interesting motivations for wanting the extensibility that sidechains provides is to be able to make that zero trust a reality for more bitcoin transaction types.

That would be great, if it was possible. However any given sidechain will always require more trust than the main chain. I don't believe the white paper made the claim that sidechains will be zero trust, did it?

Just terminology I mean where you find a way to express the security critical parts of the business logic so that it runs in a smart-contract, and then the blockchain enforces it for you. For example lets say daily spend limits, if bitcion scripts had access to value as well as block height (without getting into address reuse for now) you could write a script to protect yourself from being coerced to spend your savings when you're trying to spend < $1000/day or whatever as a basic precaution from that wallet. Its more secure if the blockchain enforces that than if a server does via a multisig where the server is the policy decision point because the server could be compromised.

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The worst case scenario for sidechains is that they are used as an excuse to keep Bitcoin's transaction rate capped forever.

Well block size is an interesting debate. Lots of people on both sides of that decentralisation vs scalability. I made my comment on it earlier in the thread here in reply to Peter R comment about it. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=68655.msg9997995#msg9997995 on this thread. Peter Todd for example is pretty against increasing blocksize - but believes in full nodes only, and things like tree chains, Gavin mildly exploring it as a possibility and people who rely on bitcoin scalability due to a focus on user transactions and merchant integration getting nervous about being 3-4x from seeming limit (though we've yet to see spam get squeezed out). Greg seems cautious due to centralisation risk like Peter. I think go slowly and carefully as I said.

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Based on the composition of the Blockstream team, I feel pretty safe assuming this is a goal which they will actively pursue.

You do realize that all the blockstream people are cofounders and founded the company and are philosophically inclined to defend bitcoin to the death and would quit if the rest of their co-founders went nuts and tried to coerce them or convince them to do something they considered bad for bitcoin. We have like 8 Justuses (and I'm one of them:) not even kidding (and 3 people who would bow out for technical depth).

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In that scenario we do, in fact, end up replicating the legacy banking system. There will be a real Bitcoin which only a privileged elite can access, and the rest of humanity will be relegated to transacting in money substitutes.

Yes actually that outcome also sucks and is the flip side of the debate where some people (eg Peter Todd with his keep bitcoin safe video on blocksize) small blocksizes are good for decentralisation but bad for access, if bitcoin becomes a settlement network. As I was mentioning sidechains for those who like the security tradeoffs that can be constructed with them may provide a safety valve that doesnt involve switching to an alt, or going offchain.

If you're going to go offchain obviously its better to do it with split trust (voting trust, federated peg, multi-sig vaults etc) than pure governance IOUs. But I think by being offchain you often miss out on user ethos focussed features like:

- unfreezability (exchange/vault refuses to give your coins back)
- unseizability (exchange/vault gives your coins to someone else)
- smart-contracts (if your ownership can be undone then so can a contract sort of, so it devolves from smart to dumb conventional electronic contract)

There's not a super nice answer thats in

Adam