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114 sats \ 22 replies \ @chungkingexpress 28 Jan 2023 \ on: Answering Objections to Drivechain bitcoin
My biggest concern is the unknown risks of this proposal. The goal we can hopefully all agree is to create the hardest money, that is censor-resistant and ultimately becomes the global standard.
Along the way there are many distractions that may come up, “let’s add this thing and that thing”, and before we know it we have a kitchen sink of shit that has a larger attack surface, fragments Bitcoin, and presents unknown problems. Would shitcoin drivechainers now have a say in Bitcoin dev and consensus? Would they start pushing unwanted changes to Bitcoin since they now have their foot in the door?
What if drivechains enable shitcoins that would otherwise go away? That would mean the shitcoin enemy is now within he gates of Bitcoin’s security model? How can we then say “Bitcoin not Crypto” at that point?
It is easy to look this from a dev perspective of “let’s just build shiny new stuff” but Bitcoin just needs to be perfect money, not a smart contract platform, not an NFT token defi casino. Unless there is a much deeper analysis and study done on the impact of drivechains I am very skeptical.
Maybe I have missed you arguments but that is what it looks like to me!
There are many unknown risks of not activating BIP300.
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Will the lack of privacy on Bitcoin enable state co-option?BIP300 might help with that.
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Will the declining revenue for miners mean bitcoin transactions take weeks to settle, forcing users onto other chains?BIP300 might help with that too.
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Will the scarcity of bockspace on Bitcoin force most users to rely on a custodian?BIP300 might even help with this.
I think it's much more risky not to activate BIP300.
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Will the lack of privacy on Bitcoin enable state co-option?
BIP 300 has nothing to do with privacy, sure you can make privacy focused sidechains, but we already have liquid and no one uses it.
Will the declining revenue for miners mean bitcoin transactions take weeks to settle, forcing users onto other chains?
This makes no sense, the difficulty adjustment exists
Will the scarcity of bockspace on Bitcoin force most users to rely on a custodian?
If this is the scare, something like coinpools is a much better approach. It actually works on solving the problem rather than just creating another blockchain.
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Maybe no one uses Liquid because
- it's trust model is worse
- there is basically no tooling or software support because it is seem as a Blockstream thing, not a community thing
- it doesn't actually provide privacy out-of-the-box, you need someone to host a coinjoin pool inside and there are none -- whereas the zSide sidechain would automatically be that perfect ongoing coinjoin with no overhead, cheap fees and great UX
- because you have to do KYC on an exchange to withdraw
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something like coinpools is a much better approach
I agree with this, I would actually use a coinpool whereas I wouldn't use a drivechain. Coinpools are non-custodial and kind of like a lightning channel, just with more than 2 keyholders. But I also want drivechain to be an option for people.
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Coinpools are those things you need two complicated new opcodes to implement and even then they still basically do not work as you need every member of the thing to be online for anyone else to transact?
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Yes, it's very exciting!
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Interesting, so now we can enter into a dialogue about these points dear Adeimantus.
Instead of the benefits you are looking at the risks of not activating something, which is must more difficult to argue for.
If we assume these are real concerns for Bitcoin, is BIP300 the only answer? Or are we trying to make BIP300 be all things for all people as if there was some fundamental flaws in Bitcoin that only this specific drivechain proposal can fix?
- Regarding privacy, does Lightning and other L2 not solve this? Bitcoin base layer has gone ok for 14 years as it is, too.
- The declining revenue has been debunked before, but I am pretty sure NGU fixes this. Every 4 years the Bitcoin supply halves, making it more valuable, and thus more valuable to mine. There will always be enough revenue for miners to secure the network.
- Would you not say that most of the world will be onboarded via Lightning as their 'bank account'. This will happen in stages over the coming decade and of course it won't work all at once, but there is enough blockspace for what is important.
Do you have any specific arguments that can only be solved by drivechains?
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If we assume these are real concerns for Bitcoin, is BIP300 the only answer?
No
Or are we trying to make BIP300 be all things for all people
I only want it to be one thing for some people. Not all people will want to use any new softfork. Drivechain would only be for people who trust miners to hold their coins while they use a sidechain.
Regarding privacy, does Lightning and other L2 not solve this?
They definitely help but I don't think lightning solves privacy. Widespread use of coinjoin probably solves it, but coinjoins are large transactions and they take up a lot of blockspace. Some people like to do them on sidechains, and some people would like to do that but they don't trust the sidechains that currently exist. I'd like to help them coinjoin on a sidechain they trust.
There will always be enough revenue for miners to secure the network
I agree
Would you not say that most of the world will be onboarded via Lightning as their 'bank account'
I don't think that is likely yet, not until lightning's reliability improves. (For me, as a daily user of lightning, about 10% of my transactions fail.) One of my hopes and dreams for lightning development is that various attempts to improve the network may lead to the discovery of scaling technology that is even better than lightning. If that happens, maybe that will onboard most of the world. But with lightning working the way it does right now, it is pretty unreliable as a payment method, at least in my experience, and therefore I don't think most of the world would like it very much if they tried to use it. I think they'd even prefer to go back to visa, if they had to use lightning as it exists right now. But that just means there are opportunities to improve lightning! It's gotten so much better over the years and I think it will continue to improve.
Do you have any specific arguments that can only be solved by drivechains?
Not "only," no. I think there are usually multiple approaches to solve problems in bitcoin and several of them can work together to solve its remaining issues. Drivechain is one thing that helps us solve some problems. It helps with scalability, it helps with privacy, it helps with new script functions, but it's not a panacaea for everything, and I don't think it's a perfect, final solution for the things it helps with. But let not the perfect be the enemy of the good. Drivechain helps make better sidechains, it brings more fee revenue to miners, and it does not harm me or (hopefully) anyone else. That's good enough for me to want it.
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Could you clarify for me please, are sidechains currently possible at all? Does Drivechain usher them in, or does it simply make it easier?
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Sidechains are currently possible, current examples include liquid, rootstock, and namecoin. Drivechain lets us do them better.
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The goal we can hopefully all agree is to create the hardest money, that is censor-resistant and ultimately becomes the global standard.
Yes, agreed.
Along the way there are many distractions that may come up, “let’s add this thing and that thing”, and before we know it we have a kitchen sink of shit that has a larger attack surface, fragments Bitcoin, and presents unknown problems.
Yes, that would be bad. I don't think drivechain is an example of a kitchen sink thing. Its simplicity and its focus on "let just do one thing well" is one of its strengths.
Would shitcoin drivechainers now have a say in Bitcoin dev and consensus? Would they start pushing unwanted changes to Bitcoin since they now have their foot in the door?
I don't think drivechain gives them a foot in the door. It puts them on a sidechain. "Make your mess on a sidechain" is my message to people who want to make unwanted changes to bitcoin. Drivechain lets us benefit from their madness, because anything you do on a blockchain has a fee attached. With today's altcoins, those fees benefit altcoin miners and stakers. With drivechain, those fees go toward bitcoin miners and help secure our coins.
Yes, bad people will try to change bitcoin to suit their scammy desires. That's how they operate and they won't stop. (#ChangeTheCode, anyone?) But drivechain doesn't help them do it more, instead, to the extent that bad people use drivechain, it takes their fees and uses them to secure our coins.
What if drivechains enable shitcoins that would otherwise go away? That would mean the shitcoin enemy is now within he gates of Bitcoin’s security model? How can we then say “Bitcoin not Crypto” at that point?
I don't think drivechain puts the enemy in bitcoin, I think it relegates them to a sidechain. The reasons why altcoins die natural deaths still apply to drivechains. For an altcoin to survive, it has to attract users, who (typically) quickly find that the altcoin is just a utility token that is there to take their money and offer them nothing in return. At least on drivechains the fees go to bitcoin miners instead of to scammers. That's a definite improvement.
Bitcoin just needs to be perfect money, not a smart contract platform, not an NFT token defi casino.
Putting those things on drivechains instead of on bitcoin helps me secure my coins without adding smart contract rules or nft silliness to bitcoin. If people are going to pay ridiculous fees to make nfts and gamble on defi, I'd rather those fees go to securing my coins than go to ethereum scammers.
Unless there is a much deeper analysis and study done on the impact of drivechains I am very skeptical.
I appreciate and value your skepticism and I hope posts like this are the kind of analysis and research you are looking for. I'm doing my best. :)
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No problem. I am trying to find truth as well as you are!
I still feel like the conception of the value of having Drivechains is misaligned though.
Drivechains assume to a degree that there is inherent value in tokens and NFTs and "stuff" that is not Bitcoin. But what if this is wrong? What if the whole token thing is a mutation of a flawed idea that was given unwarranted attention and energy in recent years?
I cannot think of an easy analogy, but it is like we have this lean, streamlined aircraft that is Bitcoin, but some people want to add these heavy concrete blocks that are functionally useless on the promise that it will help the airplane fly faster? (Sorry that is a bit rough)
The mining fee argument and trail emissions is a seperate topic which requires an in-depth study I think, but ultimately if Bitcoin requires Drivechains to makeup the fees to keep the miners going then I feel we have already failed.
I would like to flip this conversation though!
Could you please give me the strongest and most important reasons for why this proposal is important for Bitcoin?
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Could you please give me the strongest and most important reasons for why this proposal is important for Bitcoin?
It's an improvement over the current way we do sidechains by making them more censorship resistant. That's all I've got. It's not a magical panacaea that "saves bitcoin" from huge and important problems. It's more like taproot, which was very good but not something we added because bitcoin would die without it. Take all the things we can do right now with sidechains, and to all of those things, apply the adjective "now more censorship resistant!" That's what drivechain gives us.
BTW on your airplane analogy, I think you are saying that NFTs and defi are the heavy concrete blocks, and what I am saying is that drivechain does not add them to bitcoin. It puts them on separate airplanes, but now the guys who work on our airplane get paid better, because they get the money from the tickets people paid to get on those other airplanes. With that money, they are in a better position to keep us more safe and secure. But our airplane didn't change (well, it barely changed -- bip300 is a very simple softfork that just adds a new type of timelock). It's still as sleek and fast as ever.
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Can you give some examples of current sidechains please?
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- Liquid
- Rootstock
- Namecoin
I'm not sure why there's no monero sidechain but if there was I would add it to the list. I don't think anyone really cares about another one beyond those. I would add a big block sidechain too, but liquid and rootstock already support big blocks, so they take care of that.
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I had heard of Liquid, but I did not realise Namecoin was available as a sidechain. What are the differences in the peg process vs bip300?
What is the incentive for a side chain to stay on Bitcoin longterm?
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Yeah, namecoin was the like the prototype for future sidechains, Satoshi Nakamoto helped conceptualize merge mining when namecoin was originally created, back then it was called BitDNS. It didn't attempt to do a two way peg with bitcoin though, so it's not like modern sidechains in that respect.
In liquid and rootstock there is a group called a federation who runs a multisig bitcoin address. To put money on the sidechain, you're supposed to send money to that multisig address and specify what address on the sidechain belongs to you. The sidechain then detects that you put X bitcoins into the multisig and that same amount shows up in your sidechain address. When you are done using the sidechain you are supposed to burn however many sidechain coins you have at that point and tell the federation what bitcoin address to send the corresponding amount of bitcoins to. Then you trust them to do that, and the fact that it's a multisig is supposed to help reassure you. As long as you trust a sufficient number of the people in the multisig, the federation cannot steal your money without corrupting the people you trust.
Bip300 itself does not have anything obvious in common with any of that, it just creates a new timelock. A bip300 timelock is similar to
OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY, which is the timelock where you can only spend your coins after waiting X blocks. Bip300's new timelock is different because it lets miners increase the value of X through a 51% vote. That way, if two people try to withdraw the same coins from a sidechain whose deposit address uses this timelock, miners have time to decide which one should "win," and their ability to increase the value of X lets them pause one withdrawal attempt, if necessary, to let the other one go through. But since it takes 51% of miners to lengthen the timelock, 51% of miners have to agree on which withdrawal attempt should "win."It's a pretty clever way for sidechain makers to let bitcoin miners process sidechain withdrawals. One of the things I like about it is that it's a very simple primitive: it just gives us a new type of timelock. All the complicated logic about miner incentives and sidechain game theory is built on top of just a simple little timelock. I think that's cool.
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Bip300's new timelock is different because it lets miners increase the value of X through a 51% vote
Must 51% of miners be able to co-ordinate in order for BIP300 to be safe? Because one of the beauties of bitcoin is miners dont have to coordinate in order for it to be safe. And by the time miners have coordinates to increaes the timevalue thing, will it be too late?
Thanks this is a good explanation. What else could that timecode marker enable? Can it be used in non-side chain applications in any way?