Using simplified payment system to support a chain hierarchy

[TierNolan]

In the thread on the block size, markm suggested multiple chains as an alternative.

The problem is moving coins back upwards.  If you require proof that the coin has not been spent by the lower chain, then you defeat the purpose of splitting.

What if the higher level chain uses the simple verification procedure on its immediate children chains (say limit that to 4).

The higher level chain could have a payout to "demote" and the lower ones could have a payout to "promote".  The demote transaction would say which address in the lower chain to pay.

If a lower chain pays to a "promote" transaction output and the lower chain has sufficient funds (total demote must be greater than total promote) and the output is at least N (say 128) blocks deep, then it is accepted.

This could be stacked.  Moving coins between levels would be slow, and the lower chains could have a smaller delay for promotions.

To verify the top-chain, you just need to download the headers for the 4 children (and some orphan block header) and the full block chain for the toplevel chain.

This potentially would mean there is no real need for a toplevel chain block size increase.

You would need to have a rule that the main chain "stamps" the state of the 4 children chains, as they were 128 blocks ago and these count as checkpoints for those chains.

[markm]

Various ideas have come up from time to time to lock-step exchange rates between chains, but I think in the kind of scenarios we are usually hoping / projecting for that stuff is kind of a bit anal, in that whether or not a coin or few more or less does or does not exist in the primary chain isn't actually a big deal. For one thing we don't even know already how many coins actually really exist right now "in practice", just how many were minted and a bunch of cool stories about how this that or the other poor fool managed to purportedly lose some coins. Have any of them even proven they are really lost? Can it ever even be proven?

If we turn out to only have 20,999,999 trillion-dollar coins instead of 21,000,000 trillion-dollar coins how much difference does that make, really, to the value of each of those coins? Especially with variances as new technologies and products come into existence to be bought and sold, and old technologies decline in attractiveness to be bought and sold less and so on. (Ultimately its the universe you can count with the beans that measures the per bean value, yes?)

Is the first secondary chain likely to be worth even one whole trillion dollars? If so then how many trillions? Of the first ten secondary chains, about how many trillions is each entire chain likely to be worth?

Meanwhile don't think fiat is going to up and walk off into the sunset in the meantime. And how many ounces of silver are out there? And how many ounces of gold? And how many lower-class-family full lower class conveniences housing units? And how many middle-class-family full middle class conveniences housing units? And so on and so on and so on. There is an ocean of value to count the drops of and a lot of beaches of grains of sand of value and humanity keeps creating more value out of less materials all the time, as Bucky Fuller famously pointed out.

I doubt there is really a whole lot of point in getting anal about the silly bean-counting games that maybe when taken too seriously, especially if allowed to cause people to imagine a universe of scarcity instead of recognising the universe of abundance in which we actually are, xould potentially lead to uncool stuff, hostility, violence, gosh knows what.

There are more than enough forward people-days of lifesupport for everyone, and all the tools to increase the number of people-days of lifesupport going forward, so lets not bother trying to legislate the exchange rates if we don't have to? Why tee off the free market enthusiasts over a few more or less beans, peas, legumes, peanuts, chickenfeed etc etc etc if we don't have to?

-MarkM-