Re: [bitcoin-dev] Smart Contracts Unchained

[ZmnSCPxj <ZmnSCPxj@protonmail.com>]

Good morning Aymeric,


> What if the smart contract platform(s) disappear?
>

It is still possible to recover the funds, *if* you can convince all participants of some "fair" distribution of the funds.
You do this by all participants simply signing with their participant keys and taking the first branch of the script.
This branch does not require the participation of the smart contract platform, at all.
If all participants can agree to the result of the smart contract without dispute, then they can exit the platform even after the platform disappears.

Now of course there will be participants who will not cooperate in such a case, for example if they were doing some betting game and "lost".
But at least it gives the possibility of doing so, and it will not be as massive a loss.

Indeed, if the smart contract platform code is open source, it may be possible to set up another implementation of the smart contract platform.
And it would be possible to at least try to convince all participants to switch to that new platform (again, via the "as long as everybody agrees" escape hatch).
Again, this is not possible with current federated sidechains, or Ethereum (if Ethereum fails, all ETH becomes valueless).

> The proposal induces a very centralized system, to my knowledge all of
> existing sidechains whether on bitcoin or ethereum are centralized,
> except lightning (if we forget that someone must watch what others are
> doing when you are on a trek in Nepal)

I would not lump together Lightning with sidechains.
Indeed, this design moves things closer to true offchain techniques (as in Lightning) than to sidechain techniques.

So while centralized, it is less centralized than a federated sidechains.

> Now I don't get why a sidechain should be a blockchain on top on another
> one (given also that we can't consider bitcoin or ethereum as
> decentralized today, so the path might be long for the sidechains...),
> the latest is used to store the final state, the former does not have to
> store forever the intermediate states, then it could just use a
> decentralized system (not necessarilly blockchain-like) to store the
> intermediate states and maybe be a distributed escrow
>
> I know, easy to say, please do it (why not), now the fact that
> sidechains claim to be decentralized or that they will be is just
> misleading people (that's not the case of your proposal but it does not
> say what happens if the platforms go down)

Perhaps it can be a next step.

Regards,
ZmnSCPxj