Quote from: BlindMayorBitcorn on February 09, 2016, 01:36:17 AM

Is Core adding extra code in order to support sidechain technology? There's been some grumbling about that. Is that a consensus rule change?

I haven't heard of any plans in the near future to make consensus rule changes for sidechains. Sidechains are completely open and you can play with the code and run sidechain node if you want. They are mainly used for testing new features right now. I understand what you are insinuating with your concerns... and let me address that:

I don't assume bad faith within Core developers, partly because I know of some and know of a majority of their mindset with following their logs and discussions. I really do respect your skeptical mind however. For the sake of argument lets assume that these fears are real, that blockstream is trying to subvert our ecosystem and is controlling core to sell their products on sidechains.

This is why I am not worried-

1) The core developers are very transparent and this is an open source project. If at any point in time notice anything nefarious we will instantly fork away with or without the miners. It really doesn't matter if Core developers are malicious or not because there are thousands of extra eyes reviewing their code. This being said we should indeed have other development teams (like we do) managing other repositories.

2) We aren't going to accept the LN or sidechain products that aren't open source or don't have a level playing field for all economic agents added to the network. Additionally, the LN allows for us to solve a really large dilemma with incentivizing full nodes by paying them.

3) Banks are going to produce private blockchains regardless... it is much better that future sidechain products are sold to the banks which make sure they are dependent upon the main bitcoin block chain.

4) Whether or not Core gets the economics and incentives right is up for debate... In reality this is a complex experiment with many known unknowns and unknown unknowns; anyone claiming to know the future or the right balance of incentives for nodes and miners is likely wrong. Cores conservative approach is prudent under this scenario and we are lucky to have a diverse set of bright minds working with us to solve these problems.

Quote from: Cconvert2G36 on February 09, 2016, 01:48:32 AM

Miners are incentivized by the market to make decisions, they don't make these decisions in a vacuum free of consequence.

Yet miners make critical mistakes all the time that jeopardize the network (BTCC spinning up 100 nodes/ SPV mining ) , Developers make mistakes all the time (One of Satoshi's many mistakes - https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0042.mediawiki) . Thank Goodness no one controls bitcoin and we have to work together and rely on each other to solve these problems.