Replying to Avatar preston

Drivechains

Alright people, we are playing a game of chess here. The one thing, the absolute one thing, we can't do is give up the king. To give up the king, in my humble opinion, is to mess up the base layer. This mistake would disrupt the delicate incentive structure that ensures sound money. That sound money pegs the extremely fragile credit markets and out-of-control G7 policymakers that are creating clown world with their CB fiat policies.

We don’t need the sound, pegged, money to move fast, we don’t need the money to do smart swoopty things, we just need it to be pegged, immutable, and digitally sailable to actually stop the madness of clown world.

By introducing a whole lot of technical complexity to the base layer and potentially screwing with the incentives all so we can connect to a bunch of centralized shitcoin projects is like playing offense with the king when you’re down 7 pieces and the other player still has their entire back row at their disposal.

A. Why the rush!?

B. Why not just go use Monero if you need that level of anominity in your transactions. Why do you have to have it in a wrapper via drivechains?

C. Why risk the king without deep understanding and testing of the technical risk and potential change to incentives?

The beauty of Bitcoin is you can build it and softfork it, and we’ll let the community vote with their nodes. BUT, I for one, have no use for drivechains (that doesn’t mean everyone is like me). And as a result, I will not be updating my node and running any attempted “secret” softfork updates by the miners.

Drivechain doesn’t affect the base chain. It’s allows for the creation of trustless sidechains.

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It does have an effect when it requires a change to support and influences miner behavior

Miners are profit seeking. That’s what proof of work is all about.

Also miners can steal from lightning network as well. Its a weak argument for being against drivechain imo.

And who controls the vetting for the limited number of drivechains that could be supported

It’s described in the drivechain BIP. I can’t remember the exact cap.

But it would be the last change needed to bitcoin.

Lightning doesn’t scale to 8 billion people mathematically but having multiple sidechains would.

Sure let’s all just keep using custodial lightning with zero privacy and pretend this is best thing since sliced bread while ignoring the bitcoin white paper.

Excuse me, sir. Have you heard about Fedimint yet? No changes to base layer needed.

Yes, Fedimint is federated by definition. It is not trustless like bitcoin was envisioned to be.

Sure sounds better than custodial lightning with no privacy.

You still have to trust someone with your bitcoin. Which is not what satoshi had in mind for bitcoin.

There’s no rush. Bitcoin works for its current user base, and could probably scale to between 250M and 500M active self custodial users as currently constructed. Maybe in 5 years the drive chain scaling discussion will be more interesting, but for now it’s a non-starter.

Some level of trust is needed for society to function. Let’s reduce the amount needed, especially for money, but it will never go away.

If you’re going to trust (many people will), you might as well get other benefits in the process. Privacy is a good benefit to get.

Read the bitcoin white paper sir. The very first paragraph.

Do you think custodial wallets are going away anytime soon? If not, wouldn’t you rather a user have privacy?

I agree that self custody for everyone is the goal but there are steps along the way as more people learn. Self custody for everyone in the world is currently not technically feasible, so let’s give people trade offs that add benefit to the users. Ecash provides privacy as a trade off for an already establish model of custody.

Mix and match

Elements. Fedimint. Cashu.

Theres no reason BIP300 would be the last upgrade. Thats koolaid talk

Cashu is custodial.

Fedimint is federated.

No idea what elements is tbh.

Liquid is federated and not open source.

Rootstock is federated but at least the fees go to bitcoin miners.

Drivechain is trustless and all fees go to bitcoin miners. You get to have Monero type privacy as well. And you can get simple scalability to 8 billion people using self-custodial.

Please help me understand the risks better. All I’m hearing at the moment is that people don’t want sidechains to use BTC as a native currency. How that negatively impacts bitcoin is unclear.

Good luck fellow traveler. The exact issues ellude me as well, but in general its always best to err on the side of not changing bitcoin because you never know how it will turn out. Unlike centralized systems, we have no reset switch.

True, but I think part of the drama is that this soft fork can be done “silently” - by miners - making it difficult to stop or prevent.

Sidechains cant have BTC as a native currency. They all are their own token even if named similarly and with 1 for 1 pegging like Liquid or anything else built with Elements. Drivechain is a different approach than peg-in/out that Liquid uses but it still has a process to get into and out of that sidechain. But instead of dealing with a discreet federation, its vetted by miners via hashrate escrows. Theres a limit of 256 slots making them rare and they can only be facilitated by miners. A normal user can not make or manage their own sidechain with drivechain. Its a centralized permissioned protocol.

That’s a feature not a bug.

Certainly

I don’t mind schemes that generate more miner revenue if it doesn’t impact *my* bitcoin. If I ignore these drive chains, could they have any impact on me?

As a user cresting transactions like today? No direct impact. For node operators, marginal resource need, but well short of that from other changes made in the past.