Over the past year or two, the main topic of conversation in the Bitcoin community has been how the system is going to eventually scale to millions or billions of users. Two concepts often brought up during these sorts of discussions are the Lightning Network and sidechains .
Blockstream is in a unique position when it comes to these Bitcoin improvements, as it has the funds and incentives to work on both of these concepts simultaneously. In a recent interview with Bitcoin Magazine , Blockstream CTO Greg Maxwell shared his views on sidechains as a scalability solution and why the Lightning Network will be a better option over the long term.
Implementing Bitcoin Classic as a Sidechain
Some members of the Bitcoin community have wondered whether it would be a good idea to implement changes to Bitcoin’s block size limit via a sidechain. In fact, one of the key points made by Bitcoin Hivemind ’s Paul Sztorc in his drivechain proposal was that sidechains would allow Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin XT to be implemented via this technology.
While Maxwell agreed that this sort of functionality is possible, he didn’t seem convinced that it would be of much use. He explained: “Our greatest motivation for the sidechain concept in Bitcoin was being able to better satisfy mutually exclusive objectives for the system. However, sidechains by themselves do not fundamentally change the scaling limitations of a global broadcast system, though they should provide security partitioning if an experimental chain should fail.” In other words, splitting sections of the network onto various sidechains does not necessarily mean that Bitcoin can then scale to an infinitely larger number of transactions per second.
The Lightning Network as a Better Option
While many believe sidechains could be Bitcoin’s long-term solution to the scalability issue, Maxwell sees […]
