Other things also snarks can do magical things (full node validation and low bandwidth), sharding like Rusty Russel is exploring with pettycoin (its not an alt, its an approach to sharding bitcoin).
Rusty Russell? The creator of iptables/netfilter?
Edit: a brief search confirmed we have another main linux kernel developer on board
Ayup the one and same. He has a video up about pettycoin chain sharding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzst_gChOr8.
btw that
is a kind of (non-pegged) sidechain and you hear him talking about a gateway or federated gateway. That is like a federated peg. (Yeah he knows its related, he's hanging out on #bitcoin-wizards and discussing pettycoin design with GMaxwell and others).
(Pettycoin is a micropayment network bitcoin auxiliary chain aiming at scaling to 100k tx/sec.)
Adam