Spacechains: How This New Bitcoin Sidechain Proposal Works
Spacechains is a proposed Bitcoin sidechain that offers a one-way peg mechanism utilizing blind merge mine design.The idea of sidechains as a scaling and feature extension mechanism for Bitcoin is a very old concept. A kind of basic "ancestor" idea of sidechains, merge mined chains, even goes back to before Satoshi disappeared. That proposal was simply the idea of two completely separate and unrelated chains being mined by the same group of miners, with no ability to move anything between chains. The original sidechain proposal was made in 2014 by many of the people who went on to found....
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Peerplays, an online gaming and wagering platform which uses open-source Blockchain technology, introduced its DAO proposal in May. After receiving feedback from DAO supporters, the platform has also decided to build a sidechain from Peerplays to Ethereum. An updated proposal was published a few days ago, offering 20% of the Peerplays earnings to The DAO in exchange for an increased valuation to cover costs associated with developing this sidechain at an accelerated pace. Peerplays might become the first startup to get support from $150 million DAO fund. The proposed price is $1.2 million....
While spacechains have limited functionality for Bitcoin users, they do provide some interesting use cases worth exploring.
Each Bitcoin sidechain implementation brings about different centralization and consensus issues to weigh and consider.
Blockstream has just announced the rollout of Liquid, its first production sidechain on bitcoin. The company has been in collaboration with its launch partners, which include Bitfinex, BTCC, Kraken, Unocoin, and Xapo. It is also in discussions with another dozen major institutional traders and licensed exchanges, according to its blog post. The bitcoin network has currently been undergoing a lag when it comes to processing transactions, most likely due to the block size limit combined with the large growth in transaction volume over the past months. Liquid aims to provide a way to improve....
The seminal Bitcoin sidechains white paper “Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains,” released in 2014 by a team that went on to form Blockstream, a leading company in the blockchain space, envisaged an ecosystem of “sidechains” separate from the main Bitcoin blockchain but interoperable with it via peg mechanisms. A sidechain can carry bitcoin as currency, in which case users will be able to seamlessly transfer bitcoin between the sidechain and the main blockchain. A sidechain can implement more powerful scripting features or more watertight privacy. Increased throughput is....