6) Develop technology which safely allows 80,000 people to ride one bus with little or no difference in compfort and maintanance costs.
Rather: "6) tell your investors that you have invented a fantastic technology which safely allows 80,000 people to ride one bus with little or no difference in compfort and maintanance costs."
Developing such technology is more challenging that the simplistic ideas of 'buy more buses', or 'charge more per ticket.'
You bet it is. That must be why Adam Back has ignored all hard technical questions about the "fee market" and the Lightning Network, and instead has been relentlessly spewing out baseless FUD and ad-hominems for the last two months. "Let Blockstream decide the future of Bitcoin, because Mark is a CIA agent". And it is working, it seems...
I've missed these, but in fairness it could be my own fault. I follow only trolltalk and some of the links provided from here. I don't even follow the commits anymore.
That seems to be the task that Blockstream is undertaking with their 'elements' suite of innovations.
AFAIK not even Blockstream claims that Sidechains will solve the scaling problem. Their pie in the sky now is the Lightning Network, which seems to be just as plausible as an 80'000 passenger bus...
I guess you are missing the forest for the trees perhaps. The idea that anyone can grab a reference implementation and do their own sidechain makes it kind of obvious to me how sidechains could solve the scaling problems and add a whole bunch more desirable niceties to the ecosystem as well.
As for LN, I have not followed it that closely. My impression is that it is subtly different from how I envision sidechains, but very interesting technology which will be valuable to develop and experiment with if nothing else. I figured that perhaps continuing development on LN might have been a way to draw in some of the high-end technical talent that was already working on it no matter what it becomes.
I could see [ the banking ] sector promoting something like XT which gives them the hope of monopolizing the take from a centralized and controlled solution just as they do with most fiat systems today.
Well, right now, if they control Blockstream, they control the future of Bitcoin...
Considering that most of the Bitcoin 'core developers' who are worth a shit are involved, that would be true with or without the Blockstream umbrella.
The fact that sidechains and Blockstream has you (Stolfi) running scared is one of the best indicators yet that the may live up to the hopes I have for them.