Side chains are a way to scale and shard horizontally while still retaining primary security parameters of the main chain.

The future is an Internet of chains, a forest of chains with bitcoin as the root chain for: factom / proofofexistence, ChainDB, Blockstream side chains, merge mined side chains, and more.  A multi-chain design is much more scalable in general.




On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:

It's simple: either you care about validation, and you must validate everything, or you don't, and you don't validate anything.

Pedantically: you could validate a random subset of all scripts, to give yourself probabilistic verification rather than full vs SPV. If enough people do it with a large enough subset the probability of a problem being detected goes up a lot. You still pay the cost of the database updates.

But your main point is of course completely right, that side chains are not a way to scale up. 

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Jeff Garzik
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