Side chains are a way to scale and shard horizontally while still retaining primary security parameters of the main chain. 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. On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Mike Hearn wrote: > It's simple: either you care about validation, and you must validate >> everything, or you don't, and you don't validate anything. >> > 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. > > But your main point is of course completely right, that side chains are > not a way to scale up. > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Bitcoin-development mailing list > Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development > > -- Jeff Garzik Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/