Hello Devs,
I am Patrick Sharp. I just graduated with a BS is computer science. Forgive my ignorance.
As per bip-0002 I have scoured each bip available on the wiki to see if these ideas have already been formally proposed and now as per bip-0002 post these ideas here.
First and foremost I acknowledge that these ideas are not original nor new.
Side Chains:
Bip-R10 offers a mechanism to assign custody or transfer coins from one chain to another. However I did not find a bip that proposed a formal bitcoin side chain.
My proposal
- They are officially supported, tracked and built by official bitcoin software meaning that they are not an external chain
- each chain has an identifier in the block header i.e. main chain: 0, first chain: 1, second chain: 2...
- the number of chains including the main chain that exists is always a power of 2, this power will also be included in the block header.
- each address is assigned to a chain via chain = (address) mod (number of chains)
- to be valid an addresse's next transaction will first send their coins to their chain if they are not already there
- if the address they are sending to is outside their chain their transaction will be submitted to both chains and transaction fee will be split between chains
- They come into being via a fork or split
- every 2016 blocks (upon recalculation of difficulty) if some percentage (lets say 10%) of blocks on any chain are larger than some specified amount (lets say 750 KB) then all chains are called to increment their power value and fork on their block.
- miner of chain x creates genesis block for chain x+2^previous power
- upon fork, the difficulty of the old chain and the new chain will be half the next difficulty
- if every chain has gone 2016 block without surpassing some amount (lets say 250 KB) at least some percentage of the time (lets say 10%) all chains will be called to join, decrement their power and double their difficulty
- given miner of chain x, if x not less than 2^new power, chain will be marked dead or sleeping
- miners who mine blocks on the chain that was joined (the chain with the smaller identifier) may have to make a block for the sleeping chain if transactions include funds that fully or partially originate from the sleeping chain
- dead chain are revived on next split.
- each block's reward outside of transaction fees will be the (current bounty / 2^fork power) except obviously for dead blocks who's reward is already included in their joined block
- benefits
- dynamically scales to any level of usage, no more issues about block size
- miners have incentive to keep all difficulties close to parity
- if miners are limited by hard drive space they don't have to mine every chain (though they should have trusted peers working on other chains to verify transactions that originate off their chains, faulty block will still be unaccepted by the rest of the miners)
- though work will still grow linearly with the number of chains due to having to hash each separate header, some of the overhead may remain constant and difficulty and reward will still be balanced.
- transactions are pseudo equally distributed between chains.
- rewards will be more distributed (doesn't' really matter, except that its beautiful)
- cons
- because most transactions will be double recorded the non-volatile memory foot print of bitcoin doubles (since miners do not need all chains i believe this solution not only overcomes this cost but may decrease the foot print per miner in the long run overall)
- transactions will hang in limbo until both chains have picked them up, a forever limboed transaction could result in lost coins, as long as a transaction fee has been included this risk should be mitigated.
I believe this idea is applicable to the entire community. I would like your thoughts and suggestions. I obviously think this is a freaking awesome idea. I know it is quite ambitious but it is the next step in evolution that bitcoin needs to take to be a viable competitor to visa.
I come to you to ask if this has any chance of acceptance.
-Patrick