Double has 53 bits position which is more than enough to encode all monetary values in bitcoin.

You know that bitcoin isn't censorship resistant?

No, soft fork.

Different chains, not forks of the same chain.

And mining is no longer progress-free. Now the fastest miner finds all the blocks.

It does not currently work on big-endian systems, no. But it could in principle be modified to work, by adding the appropriate conditional byteswaps.

How the compiled binaries behave on supported platforms (just x86, currently) is the standard behavior. It would have been better if Satoshi followed typical conventions with regard to bit- and byte-order, but that ship has long since sailed.

Unlikely.

Yes we've looked at that and it is pretty straightforward to have either inflation and moving price or demurage and a finite supply. more complicated setups are also possible of course but need to be examined in more detail.

The process can be made entirely symmetrical such that you'd be able to transfer value between any two chains, if the chains are setup to support that in the first place. However coins of the form BTC -> A -> B would be technically treated as a different asset class than BTC -> B coins, so I don't think this would have quite the semantics you are looking for.

The attack fails because of the quieting period during which anyone can step forward and provide a reorg proof showing that the claimed return peg is not the most-work chain. The attacker would have to either overpower the honest chain, or by some magical mechanism DoS every single observer of the honest chain, preventing them from telling bitcoin about the real chain.

@freedomfighter,

jestersimpps, that's a pretty picture but you know it's got nothing to do with this thread, right?

No, it'd be a soft-fork change to bitcoin.

Atomic cross-chain swap has zero risk attached. Zero. It is 100% trustless.

The pegging mechanism merely provides a mechanism for market makers to adjust supply of sidecoins based on demand.

No one does. It's a definitional difference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent


They certainly can. But there is no justification for creating another p2p issued currency (unless there is some intrinsic economic difference in the construction of the currency itself -- this is not the case with just about every alt out there except one or two).


No, the argument is that people should be bitcoin as the currency no matter what chain they are on. Merged mining is just an implementation detail.

Alt currencies are not seeking profits, they are seeking rents. That is an important distinction that should not be lost.

First, a significant amount of work needs to be built on the “burn” transaction before it is used to claim the coins on the other chain, for the simple reason of avoiding DoS attacks. Then there is a length of time called the quieting period during which the return transaction and associated proofs are published, but not finalized, and anyone else can step forward with a reorg proof and rollback the transaction. Finally, there is a period of time afterwards analogous to the coinbase maturity where the coins are not spendable because a reorg could undo the peg transaction.

So that's three different waiting periods, each of which would probably be in the range of 100 - 144 blocks, if not more. The exact parameters are not set in stone at this moment, but with that in mind we should expect a peg transaction to take at least 2-3 days to fully clear, depending on the final choice of parameters.

Yes, and in doing so they give up access to those bitcoins. So the amount of total bitcoin-equivalent coins under control by users is conserved.


Well there obviously can't be more than 21 million * peg price sidecoins. Other than that, the number of sidecoins in existence is simply determined by current demand. It helps to think of sidecoins and bitcoins being the same thing, as distinctions between the two are mostly implementation details. At any given time there are max 21 million bitcoins in existence, some of them on the main bitcoin chain, some of them on specific side chains.


This is getting into implementation details, so pay close attention to the parts which seem contradictory. Conceptually anyone who wants sidecoins and has bitcoins or vice versa can simply move value from one chain to the other, in essence destroying bitcoins and printing sidecoins albeit in a reversible process. However, this takes a considerable amount of time to clear -- about 3 days -- and blockchain space which requires fees. So in practice we fully expect that someone wanting to trade bitcoins for sidecoins will use a distributed marketplace and atomic cross-chain swaps in order to buy one coin with another, by finding a buyer at the other side. Use of the pegging mechanism will be limited to market makers who arbitrage when the price starts to deviate from the peg. Make sense?

the coins come from somewhere.when you enter into a contract with someone else their loss is your gain. when it comes your time to redeem the coins it does not matter where they came from, just who currently holds them.