Bitcoin Forum

Ok this may have been spoken about, but a scale, speed issue, may be some sort of parrallel set of blockchains. I am talking at a very general level and appreciate I may be well wrong


Firstly I appreciate that any dilution or shorter blockchain means less security, but at what point does the asymptote just not matter eg 2^100000 or 2^1000000 are both really big numbers


I just want to open the floor to thoughts about a parallel block chain system. I have had a few thoughts, but want some views of the more learner-ed before I say anything.

"Parallel blockchain" could mean different things to different people.   An alt-crypto currency is a parallel blockchain, but I'm not sure if that's what you are referring to.

As far as changing the Bitcoin protocol for "faster" confirmations, that would require a hard fork.    Unless this method adds value to Bitcoin it likely won't be accepted by the economic majority and thus will not survive as a fork.   "Faster" confirmations comes at a cost (security of confirmed transactions) and thus the Bitcoin protocol won't likely see such a change.  Again, .... other alt coins do this now.

Or were you thinking of some other approach?

I agree with you, all valid points.

I had a very rough idea, and the problem is I confess I have not gone line by line (NeHe) style through BTC code or een had time at a superficial level.

It seems though that the next block is secured by the last and so on. I was conjecturing say at some point something the clients can run [n] block chains such that each [n+1] only occurs and when the security is above a certain level, and those security characteristics are in inherited by the [n+1] chain, then new transactions for a coin get initially [randomly?] assigned to a chain and continue on until the next [n+1] and  assignment occurs. However when dealing with a specific coins, some sort of marker data allows the client to know which of the [n] chains to access.

Again I may be talking right out of my hat here, and failing to understand a lot.....by I (dimly) perceive that satoshis signing method could be used across and between chains operating and accepted/generated by the same client/system.

Its almost as if we are going in a linear fashion when we may also go parallel using the same tech

Such a method implies sacrificing security on the individual parallel chains, taken as whole they would be of a similar security level.

The advantage being scaling.

Ok, it appears you are describing multiple standalone blockchains.

But one fourth the hashing does not give one fourth the protection.

Either the defenses are sufficient or they aren't, so the right approach is to want maximum hashing capacity securing the Bitcoin blockchain -- even in excess of the minimum level necessary.

So you don't benefit as a whole when splitting hashing capacity among multiple standalone blockchains.   And there's no difference between three blockchains each with 10 GB of storage required versus one blockchain with 30 GB, so I'm not sure what you see as being the upside with this approach.

That kind of sounds like cross-chain trading.  That's not currently something supported but here's the thoughts on it:
  - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_5:_Trading_across_chains

There's also Ripple, Open Transactions, etc, which all are solutions that let you use Bitcoin as the backing for the value transferred but using a different layer on top.