I guess you mean:


I guess the response from myself and GMaxwell kind of drifted off the topic of your question.

Sidechains are not a proprietary technology.  Everything is FOSS, open IP.  And we invested a fair bit of mental energy and legal review already into making sure it stays that way, even if blockstream management were someone replaced or blackmailed; to imagine yourself or a company a perpetual lifetime role is naive, and we've seen it before eg digicash patents got sold by the investors when they went bankrupt to some company that sat on them, preventing people who wanted to innovate using ecash.  We're all anti-patent and want to avoid that kind of crap creeping into bitcoin.  I have some first hand knowledge that some companies are patenting things related to bitcoin, and probably much more I dont know about.  I suppose someone could search patent db though filing is a long slow process.  At ZKS where I was working on our ToR-precursor and ecash, back in 1999-2001, Austin tried to buy digicash patent and making it available in the public domain, we failed to buy it sadly.  John Gilmore was our advisor and he'd helped cook up an open patent license GNU like scheme.

Its not our softfork - its a softfork to enable a generic extension mechanism.  We have no monopoly (and wouldnt want one) on use of the op code.  Our only defence is meritocracy - if we build better, more secure sidechains and people prefer to use them.  We wont be getting the fees off the sidechain either because those go to miners.  If we have the technical edge and people use our stuff that seems sort of fair enough to me.

Personally I guarantee I trust each and everyone of our team more than J Random web2.0 startup CEO.  What do those guys want?  To make a profit.  Would they stop at sabotaging bitcoin to get there?  I doubt it.  Some of the bitcoin web2.0 startup guys are cool and bitcoin enthused.  But they're getting patents some of them, and not all of them will survive.  Crappy things the less cool startup CEOs might try eg the red-ilist or other things so sucky I wouldnt even describe them for fear it'd give people ideas that they lack the technical competence to design.

I do get where you're coming from, in the past I was the guy holding people to account eg PGP incorporated when they were busy trying to include key escrow into PGP ostensibly for corporate data access.  (I imagine people selling stingrays tell themselves something also).  Partly due to my efforts that was never included in the open-pgp IETF spec.

Sidechains are just a mechanism to extend bitcoin.  The interesting thing is the extension not the chain.  If a better way to do it materialises great.  If some sidechain innovations are so cool and well validated from $1b resting on them for a year that it allows bitcoin core to merge them fantastic.  Actually Pieter Wuille views that as the best way to view the utility of sidechains, to enable longer and live validation of things that could then go into bitcoin where that'd be difficult to impossible to gain that confidence on directly.

There can also however be one-size fits-all limits.  Some extensions are mutually incompatible, or too risky though interesting (eg snark contracts, zerocash) unless a way to contain the risk in chain is found.  Also you can get some new scaling possibilities by having chains with different blocksizes.  Its more decentralised and safer to have a small bitcoin main block and a medium sized sidechain block, than introduce a large main bitcoin block as there is an escape route and choice.  You can within limits get your cake and eat it.

Adam