Hi Erik,

I don't think that your design is competitive. Why would users tolerate a depreciation of X% per year, when there are alternatives which do not require such depreciation? It seems to me that none would.

Paul

On 6/20/2017 9:38 AM, Erik Aronesty wrote:
- a proof-of-burn sidechain is the ultimate two-way peg.   you have to burn bitcoin *or* side-chain tokens to mine the side chain.   the size of the burn is the degree of security.    i actually wrote code to do randomized blind burns where you have a poisson distribution (non-deterministic selected burn).    there is no way to game it... it's very similar to algorand - but it uses burns instead of staking

- you can then have a secure sidechain that issues a mining reward in sidechain tokens, which can be aggrregated and redeemed for bitcoins.   the result of this is that any bitcoins held in the sidechain depreciate in value at a rate of X% per year.   this deflation rate pays for increased security

- logically this functions like an alt coin, with high inflation and cheap transactions.   but the altcoin is pegged to bitcoin's price because of the pool of unredeemed bitcoins held within the side chain.



On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 7:54 AM, Paul Sztorc <truthcoin@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Erik,

As you know:

1. If a sidechain is merged mined it basically grows out of the existing Bitcoin mining network. If it has a different PoW algorithm it is a new mining network.
2. The security (ie, hashrate) of any mining network would be determined by the total economic value of the block. In Bitcoin this is (subsidy+tx_fees)*price, but since a sidechain cannot issue new tokens it would only be (tx_fees)*price.

Unfortunately the two have a nasty correlation which can lead to a disastrous self-fulfilling prophecy: users will avoid a network that is too insecure; and if users avoid using a network, they will stop paying txn fees and so the quantity (tx_fees)*price falls toward zero, erasing the network's security. So it is quite problematic and I recommend just biting the bullet and going with merged mining instead.

And, the point may be moot. Bitcoin miners may decide that, given their expertise in seeking out cheap sources of power/cooling, they might as well mine both/all chains. So your suggestion may not achieve your desired result (and would, meanwhile, consume more of the economy's resources -- some of these would not contribute even to a higher hashrate).

Paul




On 6/19/2017 1:11 PM, Erik Aronesty wrote:
It would be nice to be able to enforce that a drivechain *not* have the same POW as bitcoin.

I suspect this is the only way to be sure that a drivechain doesn't destabilize the main chain and push more power to miners that already have too much power.