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1700 sats \ 11 replies \ @super_testnet OP 29 Jan 2023 \ parent \ on: Answering Objections to Drivechain bitcoin
Yes, agreed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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?
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They have three months to figure out which one to support. When each miner mines a bitcoin block they get to increment or decrement the timelock on a withdrawal attempt. So they don't have to talk to one another, just decide individually what they want to happen, and then the number will go up or down based on the action that each miner performs. If, without coordination, precisely 50% of miners + 1 increment it every time they mine a block, it will very gradually climb toward the height when the withdrawal goes through. If not, it will gradually recede back to it's initial value, allowing the rightful owner to get ahead.
I'm also simplifying a bit, you can read https://bips.xyz/300 for the full details.
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?
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I'm not sure. Under what circumstances would you want to have a timelock that miners can vote to lengthen? Maybe it could be useful in a vault scenario, where you have your coins in cold storage, but if a thief gets ahold of your private keys, you get time to notice the withdrawal attempt and petition miners to let you withdraw your coins instead (and pause the thief's withdrawal attempt).