Quote from: tvbcof on November 15, 2014, 07:57:18 PM

Quote from: tim2020 on November 15, 2014, 07:28:27 PM

Quote from: tvbcof on November 15, 2014, 06:36:46 PM

Quote from: tim2020 on November 15, 2014, 06:28:46 PM

This is a popular thread in that it's always at the top. I've been fascinated by Bitcoin for for over a year, and have decided to join bitcointalk.org to get more involved.
I see Side Chains as more interesting than gold and would really appreciate a summary of the pros and cons they have for Bitcoin.

Why is this even a debated topic?

Probably because some people became invested (financially and/or emotionally) in various strategies which were predicated on certain expectations of how Bitcoin would overcome it's rather obvious weaknesses and did not anticipate sidechains as being one of them.

In this respect sidechains are every bit as much of a 'disruptive technology' to Bitcoin as Bitcoin is to the mainstream debt-based monetary system. Naturally some people will lose, but they won't be going down without a fight.

Thanks for your reply. I'm not convinced Bitcoin is all that disruptive, the problem I see in fiat, is governments are creating more than relative GDP. To that existent Bitcoin can be a store of value to offset the overprinting.

So I'm not seeing the potential disruption to Bitcoin. As a small holder of Bitcoin having survived one bear market, how do Side Chains disrupt Bitcoin and what does this mean for it's function as a store of value?

I just mean that if one had been planning their activities based on the assumption that Bitcoin would balloon and centralize to a smaller number of favored infrastructure providers (as one example) then sidechains could be considered highly disruptive to plans built around that expectation.

One (of many) business opportunities was the construction of a tainting authority. It could not work in a free ecosystem and also could not work without a government mandate which would force customers (e.g., TigerDirect) onto the entity's client list.

I've outlined before how tainting could be bootstrapped without any changes to Bitcoin's protocol and with a small fraction of vendors being on-board and under modern law they could easily be made to have no choice. In a nutshell, I will devalue a tainted BTC you wish to give me even if I don't agree with tainting and have no expectation of using it at TigerDirect. The reason I will devalue it is that I myself have to get rid of it at some point.

Anyway, sidechains can make tainting vastly more difficult because of the natural mixing and distribution effects which happen within the chains. And they can pop up in whack-a-mole fasion if attacked. Even if tainting impacts sidechains via the peg, I will tend to devalue sidechain currency less because there is a strong possibility that I will do much of my activity completely within the chain.

Thanks