Bitcoin Forum

I'm wondering if something like decred time stamping service is used across bitcoin,ltc,zec etc the original bitcoin works and if they do someone could point me to that because it seems like multiple chains would need to work together in order to be more secure from being corrupted. Seems logical as each chain wouldn't need to hold every block for every chains full data just a hash of the block.

I'm a noob and rolling my face on the keyboard trying to bring information together to make it easier to explain to other people how things work. I know a lot of everything is already done and nobody really knows what isn't public.

No, they don't talk... :)

There's no point in making them talk together because each network has its own consensus rules that would prevent an attempt by a different node to talk to them anyway.

In the current model, no, blockchains do not talk to each other after a hardfork.

The whole chain is public. The only thing that is not public are your private keys to your coins. Situation is a bit different in some privacy-oriented coins like Monero, but in Bitcoin nothing is encrypted, transactions are only signed, but they are public.

Decred time stamping is a way to store an arbitrary hash on decred blockchain as "Proof-of-Existence". This has been part of bitcoin ever since day one and became popular when OP_RETURN outputs became common.
This is not related to what you are asking ahead.

Not at all. Take bitcoin for example, the thing that ensures the blockchain is not "corrupted" is the Proof of Work and that doesn't need another chain.

It won't work. Decentralization depends on the principle of "don't trust; verify". Meaning you have to download and verify everything and in order for you to do that, there have to be other nodes that store everything and can provide you with the entire block, not just its hash. Those who don't store the blocks (only store the 80 byte header) are simplified verification clients (SPV for short) like Electrum.

No. By this logic if I make now a new coin (the 10000+ th) I could require the established coins do me a favor and keep my chain too safe.
Why would they do that? Each blockchain is kept safe by the difficulty to be double spent (usually big enough hash rate). Bitcoin has secured huge hash rate and this is visible also in its price.
So if a new coin starts and gets "secured by bitcoin", it would be from start as valuable as bitcoin. Then why would people pay for Bitcoin when they can make their new coin?

No. Each blockchain goes for itself. The stronger ones will prevail.

To be more specific, it's because each network/cryptocurrency have it's own magic bytes to know whether both nodes belong on same network/cryptocurrency or not.

I don't think so, because we have merged mining and for example NameCoin is not "as valuable as bitcoin", despite having enormous Proof of Work.