Merged Mining is a key feature of IXC is
The Original Sidechain. By tying IXC to the strongest SHA256 mined coin, merged mining leverages the hashing power of both coins at an incremental cost of maintaining an additional full client and merged mining software.
Overview of Merge Mining can be found here:
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merged-mining-workThere is
not a lot of research on merged mining - a study dated Aug 17 can be found here
https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/791Trade offs seen so far which line up with research:
Pros:
1) Better immutability in fewer blocks due to increased hash rate
2) More efficient use of hashing for incremental sidechains
3) Lower mining reward and fees needed to make a side chain viable
Cons:
1) Side chains have seen increased centralization in mining - the incremental effort of running full clients and software is larger for small miners so only larger ones will take it on. Likewise there is risk for larger miners so not all will take up merge mining.
2) To support a side chain only with fees, the fees either have to increase or the blocks have to be big enough with a use case in volume.
IXC is a near clone of bitcoin. The main difference is mining completed much faster - in 2015. Once this occurred, merged mining for IXC dropped off. Mainly surviving in P2Pool and other small/medium operations. This was a very useful and noble experiment - there is a better understanding of what is required to make a merge mined side chain viable.
To improve incentives to merge mine IXC, fees and reward need to be increased - but not that much. The latest version of the iXcoin client achieves this. Next up are a couple of high volume use cases.
Final thought, Bitcoin is headed toward high value commerce and minor reserve currency status. There will need to be second and third order networks to satisfy smaller, high volume, programmable, and more private transactions. Merge mining is one approach that is established and viable now.
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