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. [ ... ] 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.
It was one of the devs (Peter Todd maybe) who wrote on reddit that Sidechains are not a solution for scaling. For some time now, I haven't seen them claim that they are. Sidechains are still said to be ways to test all sorts of alternative ideas without endangering Bitcoin itself.
As for myself, I have read the Oct/2014 whitepaper with some care, It mentions many examples of things that COULD be Sidechains of bitcoin; but I still don't know what CANNOT be a sidechain.
One fundamental property is that each sidechain is supposed to be designed, implemented, and managed by an independent team. Therefore the bitcoin developers cannot give any assurances that the sidechain will do what it claims to do, or will follow any constraints.
According to the paper, a sidechain can even have its own tokens, not pegged to the bitcoins that were exported to it. I cannot see how the sidechains could help bitcoin scale to hundreds of millions of users -- except by being altcoins independent of bitcoin.
The idea is that the sidechains are merge-mined, Jorge, on account of using the same hashing algorithm. So the miners will all be the same, except that a proportion of them will mine the other chains too, however they decide their capacity can be best utilised.
But of course, you knew that already.
@ wider bitcointalk: I and seemingly everyone else don't always have time to reply to all of this gizzard of a troll's willful distortions and contortions, suffice to say that unaddressed Stolfi posts are still staggeringly dishonest despite that. This man, and others like him, will be shunned throughout the remainder of this century when their conceits are fully exposed to the public.
That's all you can. Spitting ad hominem.
Jorge Stolfi is doing better.