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Btw, just because you want to stay only in BTC, doesn't mean others won't want to speculate on higher ROI and the potential to jump back in time and front run your early investment in BTC. And they might be correct. One thing you have to contemplate is that an altcoin could be structured to benefit from the pegged side chain BTC investment it (yes an altcoin that is also a pegged side chain) and offer a higher ROI on its own coin. You might assert you'd opt for the pegged side chain clone that eliminated the side coin atribute, but market dynamics may not play nicely with your desire.
I try to never play in a game where other's have superior info, though sometimes it's not avoidable. I don't play the various mainstream markets for this reason. I'm also lazy. It's funny and half-true that I don't really care that much about ROI, and if someone jumps out and back in again and does better than me, more power to them. They have my respect for having balls, skill, and luck.
I've timed various things about as perfectly as possible (so far), but it has been almost complete luck and in a funny way that I cannot put my finger on, I think it has been a result of fairly deliberately not trying very hard to maximize my ROI and such. I seem to be uniquely bad at predicting price behaviors on less than year long intervals.
Sometimes I've had myself half-convinced that if I had to choose between Bitcoin achieving something substantive for humanity and Bitcoin making me rich, I'd choose the former. Sometimes not. Since I've made some money already I'm pretty sure that I will put a fairly significant emphasis on furthering other goals going forward. At this point I see the goals of making money and having Bitcoin (or a follow-on) being worthwhile as being fairly aligned but this is just and accident of fate.
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I also do anticipate that sidechains will be 'half-alt' in most situations. I anticipate that the maintainers of them will generally have their own inflation/deflation schemes among other things. I'd anticipate (and look forward to) situations where an sidecoin had sort of a 'buffered peg' such that they could play with the circulation but not so fast that they could rip people off. As long as things are what Peter Todd characterizes as a 'glass bank', I'm cool with that.
I think that some of my conceptions of sidechains are at significant variance to what Back is thinking and I say that in part because he is anticipating a very much smaller number of sidechains that I am anticipating. That's fine with me...and probably would be with Back as well I'm guessing. It's possible to have an unknown future but be pretty confident that whatever it is will be better than the status quo.