I've learned over the years that 'nothing is free' and to be highly suspect of things which are.  Initially at least I would only use a sidechain which entailed some sort of a fee.  As always, I'd want to be able to see exactly what is becoming of those fees and would expect the sidechain to be completely transparent in all ways and in this way in particular.  I would expect that if there was an excess which was not refunded to users it would be going toward support of the Bitcoin core.

I expect that one thing which will develop would be that organizations run their own sidechains.  In this case they can make an economic justification for subsidizing costs.  I probably would use these types of sidechains as well as needed, but here again I would even more strongly favor this class of sidechains based on their demonstrable support of the Bitcoin core (in it's original decentralized and non-controlled form.)  This would, in fact, be a big factor in my choosing to do business with them at all.


Ya, well, don't hold your breath on that one.  Voice of experience based on years of waiting and seeing a giant nothingburger.  Maxwell did make an oblique reference to 'working on something better' probably at least a year ago.  Possibly that was sidechains and if so I'd strongly agree that it is a more promising avenue.  In the mean time the cost of bringing up a full node continues to build on the back of a giant pile of absurd and inconsequential garbage.

One fairly safe method which occurred to me would be a massively POW'd optimized re-base.  As in half the hashing power working on the best solution for at least a quarter, and maybe with the results inserted into the codebase.  This, however, was never part of the design of Bitcoin.  Maybe it will be on a sidechain.