4. If Bitcoin fails to scale then I-Can-Scale-Coin will incorporate the necessary changes and the ecosystem will move across to that alt instead. Sidechains do not help with scaling because SC volume still needs to be handled somewhere.
It can be that different security and assurances are required for different uses. You could probably afford to lose the price of a cup of coffee. Eg imagine pettycoin on a sidechain. It has sharded validation. He thinks he can get to 100k TPS. I really dont think you want
that on the main chain because its weaker, and he cut down a lot of bitcoin features to get it. But its useful.
Eg take a look at Rusty Russell's pettycoin (its not an alt its a micropayment network bitcoin auxiliary chain aiming at scaling to 100k tx/sec.)
He has a video up about pettycoin chain sharding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzst_gChOr8.
Peter Todd is also trying to figure out tree-chains which is a sort of hierarchical sharding idea.
Snarks can solve the problem too but are novel bleeding edge crypto, and so far have a key gen trapdoor also.
You probably for now dont want any of those things on the main chain if and until someone can firewall them in the chain or prove very robustly that they work.
If bitcoin rejects such things, it maybe that innovation moves to alts. That would be a sad day to me because I think it could be the end of bitcoin and even cryptocurrency period as a store of value anyway.
Quote from: JorgeStolfi on January 02, 2015, 02:47:31 PM
Since the BTC rewards and fees are now worthless, most miners stop mining BTC and keep mining GNC only. Only a few persist, for sentimental reasons. The BTC block rate drops to near zero for months, until the difficulty gets readjusted.
Then someone, not connected to Blockstream, GNC, or any other bitcoin entity, creates a new altcoin SuperShibaCoin (SSC)....
(Summary of what JorgeSolfi is saying: if one alt-coin overtakes bitcoin, people will lose confidence in cryptocurrency because it will probably happen again, and a series of popping bubbles is not a good store of value).
Yeah thats one of the reasons I am not keen on alt-coins. If an alt-coin took over bitcoin it might be the end of artificial scarcity (aka cryptocurrencies) in general, is my assertion too. You might enjoy this post:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=911339.msg10012730or the short tldr; twitter version:
https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/550841397927235584Adam