The drivechain literature wants you to feel that way. It’s obscure by intent.
Discussion
Agree. And most supporters want to bamboozle you to thinking you shouldn't understand it.
Moving coins and mining capability to sidechains (cough: shitcoins)... thereby opening doors to and from the L1 Core for coins isn't exactly a small software upgrade.
You're opening the attack and bug surface in a large way for unintended events like say Ordinals or worse.
I say they should hard fork and run the project as "Bitcoin DC" - let the public decide if it's so great. 😏🤫
Agreed.
For me, one of the least talked about effects is the new incentive for centralization.
With drivechain, miners vote to enable/disable side chains. And, importantly, disabling a side chain unlocks the funds. This creates a new and potentially large incentive for miners to centralize. A 51% attacker can sweep side chains.
Plus, philosophically, it violates the your-keys-your-coins basic contract of Bitcoin. Today, a 51% attacker can rewrite history, but they can’t take coins that belong to you without rewriting all the way back to when you got them. Under drivechain, a 51% attacker can take sidechain locked coin without rewriting history (just by building and mining specific blocks).
I'm sorry, but if a soft fork proposal can't make it's use case in less than five sentences, that is not my fault and it can gf itself.
Oh wait I forgot the drivechain use case is "it will make shitcoins obsolete".
No it won't. It is willfully ignorant to assert that shitcoins exist, entirely because sidechains on bitcoin don't. Firstly, sidechains already exist, and nobody fucking uses them. Secondly, shitcoin projects are not noble science experiments -- they are venal cash grabs, and as long as stupid people will exist, so will venal cast grabs.
Right. The main purpose of shitcoins is pump-and-dump. If the sidechain is successful at maintaining the peg, then moving shitcoins there makes no sense.
If the peg can’t be maintained, then funds go to miners, who are incentivized to centralize to sweep them.