<div dir="ltr">Side chains are a way to scale and shard horizontally while still retaining primary security parameters of the main chain.<div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Mike Hearn <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mike@plan99.net" target="_blank">mike@plan99.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><span class=""><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><p dir="ltr">It's simple: either you care about validation, and you must validate everything, or you don't, and you don't validate anything.</p></blockquote></span><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>But your main point is of course completely right, that side chains are not a way to scale up. <br></div></div></div></div>
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<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">Jeff Garzik<br>Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist<br>BitPay, Inc. <a href="https://bitpay.com/" target="_blank">https://bitpay.com/</a></div>
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