It basically enables sidechains like liquid but instead of a 11 of 15 multisig hold custody, the miners hold custody. Imo it's a terrible idea because this will screw with mining incentives and give them an option to steal from users instead having the incentive to always just mine the next block. It also can bring regulatory risk to miners, if they have custody of funds, they could be forced to get licenses and all that bs

Tldr. Drive chains are gay

It's a quick and easy way to give your life savings to Craig Wright.

This is the whole point of it. Go back and read Paul's 2015 blog post where he proposed it. The idea at the time was that Bitcoin was going to fork into a bunch of alt-chains, so Drivechains would help you buy BitcoinUL, or BitcoinXT, or BCH, or BSV.

While I fundamentally agree in free economics and people should be allowed to buy whatever scam they want, I think it's dumb to change Bitcoin's consensus algorithm specifically to accommodate scams.

Also, Paul tends to lie alot in my experience. While some people think that we should only evaluate Drivechain on its technology merits, not the personalities behind it, I disagree. I think it's a mistake to allow liars hide behind some code, as if their moral shortcomings won't have consequences down the line. An example of a recent lie of Paul's is the claim that miners don't get any revenue from Lightning, while in fact they've collected millions of $ worth of fees for channel management.

Is this a good summary from @TheBTCManual

I understand it to be sidechains that you can move BTC onto & do sh$tcoin stuff on

To add to what everyone has already explained here, I think its the opportunity to create one trick pony sidechains so a zcash-esque privacy side chain, a side chain to hold domain names, a side chain is EVM style (which you could just use RSK) and then linking them all together with Lightning/Thunder if you don't want to move back to the main chain and wait 3 months or you can't find someone to sell you a certain dc coin for another

Anyway I just think like we don't even know if these uses for a side chain are needed, I mean isn't that what altcoin chains are for? I don't think I've seen an altcoin chain yet where I was like man if this was on Bitcoin I'd be stoked

The problem with meaningful discussions about important subjects is that you can't TLDR. This is the negative side of the internet and social media, everyone wants to have an opinion with 2 or 3 bite size pieces of information. It's not possible.

Here's a good audio run down from the Bitcoin Builders podcast.

Shitcoiners looking for yield and rugging opportunities.

The only actual reason I'm advocating for them is because Bitcoiners already propped up Liquid as actual Bitcoin.

Any opposition to drivechains (unless you disliked them from the beginning) is halfhearted after that.

So right now the best "two way peg" for bitcoin scaling layers is multisig and federated solutions. Drivechain is two bips proposed in 2017 that allows for a new type of address called a hashrate escrow to hold the "drivechain" L1 bitcoin. Users send bitcoin to one of these addresses and recieve an equal amount on the drivechain. Drivechains would be blind merge mined so basically they piggy back on btc PoW and pay miners the sidechain txn fees to anchor the sidechain block header into BTC mainchain. To get funds out of the drivechain it takes 3-6 months of a slow very public process allowing for any public intervention should a majority of hashrate be compromised and trying to steal the DC funds.

Its a way to make trust minimized bitcoin sidehains for scaling and experimentation. There are already a handful of merge mined sidechains you can see in the coinbase op_return

i imagine stacker news is full of posts about drivechains