Can Drivechain make Bitcoin sidechain a reality?

Suppose you want to use a system like Bitcoin, but you don’t want to take the risk of buying the native token of this system. What should you do?

Sidechain provides a solution that allows Bitcoin to be transferred from the Bitcoin blockchain to other blockchains, so that Bitcoin users can take advantage of these independent systems.

Smart contracts, voting, super-fast confirmation times… Whatever you need a blockchain solution to achieve, sidechains promise to help you achieve these features seamlessly, trustlessly, and decentralized.

“With sidechains, tokens on competing chains become obsolete, Bitcoin smart contracts become possible, Bitcoin Core and BitcoinXT can coexist, all hard forks can be turned into soft forks, and very cool upgrades for Bitcoin are on the way!” — Paul Sztorc, author of Drivechain

Sadly, despite big VCs investing in sidechain technology, it is still in the early stages of development.

Several different teams are currently working on how to implement this architecture.

In the initial sidechain white paper released by Adam Back and the Blockstream development team in 2013, sidechains were discussed in depth, but there were also many problems.

The core of any sidechain implementation is that two digital currencies can be exchanged programmatically without the need for a third party or authorization. This "two-way fit" feature was not fully explored in the 2013 sidechain paper, and many in the community are concerned that this work may not be completed.

Regarding the issue of Bitcoin transaction cap, two-way compatible sidechains can solve this problem and move these transactions to other alternative chains, including the lightning network and bitcoin XT.

Paul Sztorc is one of a handful of developers actively exploring the concept of sidechains. His latest project, called “Drivechain — Simple Two-Way Engagement,” provides a way to engage with sidechains and will add more functionality.

It is reported that Paul Sztorc is not only the developer of Drivechain, he is also the head of several other digital currency projects, including the prediction market protocol Truthcoin . He has a lot of projects to do, and it is obvious that he urgently needs more programmers to help him realize these things.

For now, the idea of ​​Drivechain still looks complicated, and the specific technical details are not presented here. In short, this new method looks very interesting, and its implementation requires a soft fork of the Bitcoin blockchain.

The gist is that sending bitcoin to a sidechain is as simple as sending bitcoin to a specific bitcoin address, and no changes need to be made to the bitcoin code itself. Participating miners will need to download a new bitcoin client to support the new functionality.

The good news is that we no longer need to perform a hard fork, which is a relief for many developers. If the side chain is really implemented, we don’t need to perform another hard fork and bear the related risks. All future forks can be completed on the side chain.

However, the bad news is that the Bitcoin on the sidechain is more likely to be sabotaged and stolen. Miners can gather 51% of the computing power to attack a sidechain they are mining, and then they may steal the Bitcoin locked in this sidechain. Of course, this can only affect the value of Bitcoin on the sidechain, but not Bitcoin on the main chain. In Sztorc's view, this is actually very similar to the 51% attack problem of Bitcoin. He claims to have found a way to minimize this threat, and this process can make miners vote honestly.

Miners themselves don’t have to vote manually, but they need to participate in merged mining to vote. “If they do merged mining, it can be 100% automated,” Sztorc recently mentioned on Reddit. This means that not many blockchains will be compatible with Drivechain, at least not yet.

For example, competing coins based on the Scrypt algorithm, including Litecoin and Dogecoin, are not compatible because Bitcoin miners can only merge mining with blockchains based on the SHA 256 algorithm, such as Namecoin, Ixcoin and Devcoin.

Sztorc suggests that whenever you want to exchange the coins on the sidechain back to Bitcoin on the main chain, you just need to send a " withdrawal transaction transaction" to a listening address on the alternative chain, and the coins on the sidechain will be destroyed and restored to the specified destination address.

Unfortunately, the process is far from instant, as you have to wait for the other withdrawal transactions to arrive, which最少要等待三天. This delay, which can be as long as two weeks, is intended to give everyone a chance to participate and ensure that both the Bitcoin blockchain and the sidechain are on the same withdrawal transaction. If the two blockchains don’t agree, everyone has enough time to notify the other, figure out what’s going on, and resume the process once the problem is resolved.

Of course, there is still a lot of coding and experimentation to be done on this project, but it sounds promising at least. Assuming Sztorc and his team can successfully complete this project, the main problems of the Bitcoin system can be solved. For example, BitcoinXT can coexist with Bitcoin core as an alternative currency, and we can evaluate which proposal is better for Bitcoin.

More importantly, blocks on the sidechain can be created in very short time intervals. This way, the number of transactions that the sidechain can accommodate per second can increase exponentially, which of course will greatly increase investors’ overall confidence in Bitcoin.

Once sidechains are implemented, it will also attract more miners to ensure the security of the Bitcoin blockchain, adding more utility. A very positive positive feedback loop may be initiated.

Original article: http://bravenewcoin.com/news/can-drivechain-make-bitcoin-sidechains-a-reality/
By Luke Parker
Translation: Free and easy
Editor: Satuoxi
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/drivechain-sidechain ‎)