Ive been seeing a lot on drivechains and think they are super interesting.. just worried about unintended consequences which we really won’t know until after its implemented which is the scariest part
The way I see LN is that it creates unnecessary middle men and makes bitcoin payments easily compliant for financial surveillance.
One of the arguments that convinced me of drivechain is that enables sidechains and the only middle men are miners who get paid to secure the sidechains. You can have a privacy focused sidechain and scalable payments focused sidechain. I trust miners doing PoW over bitcoin banks like https://amboss.space/. Imo DC would be much better UX than using self-custodial lightning.
Discussion
Yep it’s true this is a risk to adding any new proposal. But the risk is all “opt in” for the users who use the sidechains.
Basically, the worst case scenario that can happen is users funds get stolen by the miners. But it’s worth noting that miners can steal from the Lightning Network, more easily than they can from DC.
Hmmm that’s extremely interesting moving the fees from lightning back to miners. You have definitely left me with food for thought
Just 9 months ago I was very pro-lightning btw. I am not Bcasher or a BSVer. I am not a block stream conspiracy theoriest.
I think it just didnt work out they way bitcoin marketers/devs imagined.
Hence my recent switch in the last few months to be a DC supporter when I saw it started gaining traction on bitcoin twitter.
I like your rationale and your concerns of lightning are definitely legit. Maybe lightning and DC will both have their niches and eventually we’ll have a tool belt of L2s to do what makes most sense for the use case. Or maybe DC is the next step forward. I can still see the use case of a p2p lightning channel between 2 peers who transact often together.
DC and LN can actually compliment each other according to the LNbits.com creator. Not sure how it works but recommend read this tweet:
What about BitVM I heard that could be implemented without changing base chain. Do you have any thoughts on this?
Sorry only just seen this message. Missed it.
2/3 of the creators of Bitvm, Super Testnet and Robin Linus are supporters of Drivechain.
There is twitter space on Friday with Paul Sztorc and Robin Linus to discuss bip300 and bitvm. Should be interesting.
https://damus.io/note18ge7c74xcfgkvy5wqpnwyk06dsq67m0mdmlpl4qv34xmvk3atcns68s8vy
Up until now I never read a good explanation of what DC is.
LN certainly has its issues. The idea of locking Bitcoins to transact with Bitcoin seems ridiculous. And so I am not a 100% convinced it will be the future.
But at least for what we have now seems like it’s doing ok.
The worst the LN can do is everyone closes shop, and all the coins go back to their owners.
Opt in or out. DriveChain is irreversible. Let Lightning crash and burn first, then we will go back to DC.
See that’s my main concern. I know Bitcoin needs to grow to survive but if we go down the wrong path that’s hard to recover from
Yeah, LN is what we have now with it’s good and bad. It’s doing what we need for the time being.
No point of waking up a giant if it’s not absolutely necessary.
I’m interested in BitVM which has been touted as doing the same thing as Bip300 or similar without changing basechain
BitVM feels like these folks who build computers inside of Minecraft.
We gotta wait and see how capable it will be.
😂 that’s hilarious, I used to try doing this shit
It will probably mimic those capabilities.
This is from one of the authors of BitVM.
https://x.com/super_testnet/status/1711425019656450400?s=20
This is from the founder of bitVM:
People are still talking about drivechains? It’s simple. NO! DON’T MAKE ANY UNNECESSARY CHANGES TO BITCOIN!! Anyone still pushing drivechains has a personal agenda/incentive and are reckless without seriously thinking of potential consequences. Only absolutely critical changes should ever be made to bitcoin’s code. If you want drivechains go make your own personal fork and play around with it. My nodes will stick to the secure version.
Don’t touch the base chain is my jerk instinct here too.
I’m interested in your thoughts on BitVM and what you know about it
Firstly, Dc is also “Opt in”. It’s a soft fork so those who run the software will only notice its existence. Everyone can continue running bitcoin core with BIP300 and still have the same experience. It’s not irreversible it’s possible reverse the soft fork if bitcoin core, node runners, community, miners decide its shit.
Basically, Drivechain is made up of two BIPs. BIP300 which is hash rate escrow and BIP301 is blind merge mining. All is require is add a simple opcode to bitcoin core called OP_DRIVECHAIN that counts to 13000 blocks.
Very low level, Drivechain enables a bitcoin sidechains/L2s by creating a 2 way peg in and out of sidechains where miners earn transaction fees for executing the transactions on sidechains/L2s.
Why do this?
Well you can keep bitcoin mainchain/L1 this pristine layer 1 which secure and decentralised with 21 Million cap.
But you get all the functionality and scalability you can imagine on L2s using BTC as the native currency of these sidechains. No shitcoins. It also allows devs to be more innovate and experiment on L2s without changing mainchain/L1 ever again.
What kind of functionality would be useful?
imo a Monero or Cash privacy sidechain/L2 would be very useful with much better privacy and much more userfriendly than conjoin services today.
A scalable focused payments sidechain/L2 thats makes self custody payments scalable to 8 billion people and userfriendly. A EVM style sidechain/L2 that allows for DeFi, financial applications and prediction markets would be cool on bitcoin but comes with smart contract risks of course. Every cool feature can be brought to bitcoin layer 2s by simply cloning the code of altcoins.
I think this would also kill all altcoins in time. As there is no excuse for devs to build on altcoins anymore.
Of course, the miners make a shit tonne of money to secure the network from the sidechains. Making even harder and more expensive for bad actors to 51% attack the bitcoin network. Users get what they want. Devs get to build cool toys.
Let the free market do its thing. Thats Drivechain in nutshell imo.
*without
See, that’s the interesting thing with this is that it will basically absorb the shitcoins to the bitcoin network, we get monero level privacy while also improving fees for miners and maintaining highest hash POW/security budget. As bitcoin matures I think it’s crucial that we incentivize mining at an individual level as well making it profitable for retail to mine. With more fees on L1 comes higher profitability.
My questions:
for those who do want to hold bitcoin on the L1 does this not make fees even higher to transfer in/out to cold storage?
Also, since this is a soft fork does this not open Bitcoin up to a larger attack surface at the L1?
From my level of technical understanding L1 is unaffected.
Everyone will still be able to run a L1 node and mine BTC.
Using BIP301 they can mine bitcoin sidechains.
If large mining pools do become captured by the state like Foundry reject mining of certain sidechains like privacy ones then thats where the plebs can have an edge mining privacy coins over KYC compliant Mining companies on the big stock exchanges.
Its very difficult to know how it would play out. With or Without Drivechain Mining pools becoming centralised is definitely a concern. Our only hope is the plebs can build tools/hardware to make home mining cheaper for plebs.
If L1 is unaffected how are miners on L1 now doing work/getting fees for an L2 though “similar to an LSP” to summarize as you previously mentioned? I guess I have some reading up to do to really form an opinion.
nostr:npub1s33sw6y2p8kpz2t8avz5feu2n6yvfr6swykrnm2frletd7spnt5qew252p is going to give us all a hard lesson on YouTube in a couple of days. 😅😅😅
Please don’t make us all look like fools 🤣🤣
Lmaooo I didn’t realize he was still tagged in this chain. Sorry Matt, I’m clearly still learning here being in Bitcoin for 6 years now
Lol I had no idea either. Be funny if he makes a video about this thread.
I believe Matt already covered Deivechain. So we might get a pass. 😅
In my opinion dc are just a revisit to colored coins.
Guess what we don’t use them now either.
🤷🏻♂️
I think colored coins were shitcoins like a new tokesn were issued.
Whereas drivechain sidechains are just pegged BTC on layer 2. The native currency BTC.
No you locked bitcoin up to make colored coins.
Doesnt Bisq have coloured coin used for governance on its p2p exchange?
Its not BTC, I am pretty sure its a different token. I could be wrong.
Only use bisq for btc & xmr
One difference for sure is that coloured coins are issued on Bitcoin mainchain/L1. This is not scalable or efficient way to use bitcoin blockchain.m 
My apologies colored coins are made from bitcoin transactions.
No worries. It’s been a few years since I checked. I forgotten to how they work.
If bitcoiners want to shitcoin they can use Ordinals, Inscriptions, BRC20 tokens, Taproot Assets on LN, Original Pepe bitcoin NFTs, Tokens on Rootstock, Tokens on Liquid, Tokens on RGB etc.
Bitcoiners are not interested in shitcoins for the most part.
I personally dont think DC is going to create a shitcoin casino. I think it will actually enable useful features, market places and apps for bitcoiners.
You kinda just proved my point why we don’t need drive chains.
Look at all the tools built already & we don’t use them.
I believe we dont use them because they are dog shit tools lol with so many limitations.
They are either centralised, federated, require custodians, and very slow/expensive to use with bad UX.
That’s my thought.. everyone was talking about Liquid this way years ago and now we have it and do nothing with it
Still not sure why we haven’t lifted the block size or done Segwitx2 at least
Just flip a switch & lower fees make more room for whatever type of transactions to collect more fees for the miners like it was intended.
It’s really not that hard guys.
Liquid is federated with unknown group of federation members who can steal you bitcoin at anytime if they wish to collude.
Liquid doesnt offer much, 1 minute for transactions to execute which is very slow despite being 9 minute improvement on mainchain.
Liquid has confidential transactions which can still be traced so the privacy of Liquid is nonexistent.
The apps on Liquid are limited. The only app I see being cool is the LBTC and USDT AMM pool. Could be used to hedge your bets to convert USDT to Bitcoin without using exchange. Since the network effect is low, liquidity is low making slippage a problem when using these AMM pools.
Liquid lacks a network effect due to being a permissioned network, slow transactions speeds, lacks privacy and lack of applications.
There is no guarantee DC will succeed.But there is equally no guarantee any L2 succeed. But I am of the view its better to “try and fail” than “fail and never try”.
So, do you like liquid or not? 😂
Never used it
His video today ended with talking about BitVM saying a video is coming out about it tomorrow as a better idea to DCs. I like to think he’s seen this thread 😂
Maybe he should wait til Robin Linus and Paul Sztorcs discussion on Friday twitter space. Could be interesting. You don’t want to say anything dumb prematurely.
Think I saw that one, I try to watch every episode of his lmao. He didn’t really go deep into the technical side of drive chains but he basically warned against changing anything at the base layer
Yeh he said something like bitcoin should be digital gold not be a Swiss Army knife.
But with bitcoin + BIP300 you can have both. It’s not either or. You can have digital gold on layer 1. You can have the Swiss Army knife on Layer 2s/sidechains.
Mr. Kratter, if you’re out there in the Rockie mountains watching over this hellthread please address the concerns brought up about lightning and implementing DCs to sub as an improved medium of exchange to lightning, and if possible help form an opinion further here for your viewers with the tradeoffs between DC vs lightning. a lot of bitcoiners are pushing this off and eventually will come a time where we have to make a decision to run this software on our nodes or not. Would bip300 affect L1 and how? What are potential failure points to DCs? See rest of thread for other concerns
Merge mining is mechanism that allows bitcoin miners to miner other blockchains/sidchains while mining the main bitcoin blockchain. Merge mining already exists and was first implemented by Satoshi in 2011 with Namecoin/BitDNS. Blind Merge Mining (BIP301) the is just a standardised version so bitcoin miners can miner multiple sidechain at once without needing to run sidechain/L2 Nodes.
Rootstock/RSK sidechain already enables merge mining, the only downside of RSK is that its owned by IOV labs and has federation of known members who can be captured by the state and steal your funds at any moment
I recommend reading this article on merge mining by Sergio Lerner to fully understand how it works in practice: https://medium.com/iovlabs-innovation-stories/merged-mining-and-decentralization-7c2590f928ed
