Re: Sidechain Observer - Bitcoin L2 Projects & current state of development
but the wordage of the whole L2/"layer" tag is becoming defunct/redundant
its not like most subnetworks remain layers that only wrap around a core network and function solely to secure the enclosed value of that one mainnet.. instead many are subnetworks that bridge between multiple mainnets so thats why the community prefer words like subnetworks and bridges (think subways and highways and bridges with on and off ramps between multiple communities)
I actually agree with you a bit about this issue, above all if we talk about sidechains. From a networking point of view, a sidechain is indeed a subnetwork, or in some cases a separate network with some overlap with the main network (if not all nodes on the "L2" chain are also nodes of the L1 chain).its not like most subnetworks remain layers that only wrap around a core network and function solely to secure the enclosed value of that one mainnet.. instead many are subnetworks that bridge between multiple mainnets so thats why the community prefer words like subnetworks and bridges (think subways and highways and bridges with on and off ramps between multiple communities)
But only a bit
Because if we look at the whole thing from a transaction-centric view, i.e. instead of looking at the node network graph, looking at the transaction graph, then I think the Layer-2 analogy still holds.
If an user pegs-in 1 BTC into a sidechain, and then 1 month later another users pegs-out this 1 BTC after with the "sidechainBTC" (i.e. the utxos created on the sidechain as a result of the peg-in) 1000 transactions were done on the sidechain, from Bitcoin's transaction graph's point of view what you do is bundling 1000 transactions into one (very simplified). The sidechainBTC transactions thus can be considered a layer to the "true BTC" of the mainchain.
Perhaps we can agree on that sidechains can act as a layer for transactions, but they aren't only a layer but actually can have a lot of other functions too, and from a networking point of view they are actually often not really a layer.