IMO there are a few very interesting things in the drivechain proposal. What is controversial is just the hash rate escrow. I am totally for sidechains. But in the end I am not sure if two-way peg makes sense. If you believe in the utility of a privacy sidechain, you should provably burn bitcoin on the bitcoin network and in exchange get X on that chain. And that other X might then fluctuate on the market in exchange for bitcoin on the original chain. So in essence you got a new shitcoin. But unlike an ICO you burned the money instead of the scammer :)
reply
Yeah, I'm worried about the 2 way peg too.
reply
From a technical standpoint it makes me feel bad that the bitcoin network needs to be aware of a specific sidechain. If you need 1-to-1 peg you can do it like Liquid with a federation multisig lock on bitcoin side. Yes, it requires trust but also when you use some X chain it's similar. They can rug you immediately and then "peg-out" your BTC. Why would bitcoin miners "voting" make you feel any better?
I believe we need to separate "funding the development of a new idea" from "token issuance". There is no problem if somebody creates a new chain and their own coin. We should not force BTC to be used everywhere since perhaps this new protocol has very different requirements. What actually IS problematic is that those coins were created out of thin air and that this new chain does not have any real resilliency. (Blind) merge mining can solve the second point. And for the first the tokens should be created just by provably burning BTC, everything else should be considered a scam and not a good faith experiment. Development team can then get donations and burn those to get coins.
reply