Mental Gents! How shall we define blockchain equivalence?

[NASDAQEnema]

An economy is made up of earnings, savings, investment, trade.

The vague as hell rhetoric around supply and demand doesn't cut it.

Some people don't switch products because of performance nor price. Deal with it, purists.
Some people choose a product because the kind of community it attracts, how many people have interchangeable parts, which product has a service center closer.
I really shouldn't have to explain this.

So with the drama that goes on in some places, people may decide to fork (like they do software) and start over and produce an identical chain with few differences but a different community. We will have to at some point negotiate among these blockchains. Exchanging by signing contracts isn't going to cut it. We will have to have a means of converting coins.

A few of us have some ideas but we're curious what you guys think.

One idea we came up with is: Mining conversion tokens

You mine bitcoins and in the process of creating a block you also include a multiplier token which is now part of the action. The token portion would be reversible and other multiplier tokens could be inserted in the conversion.

If you were to convert between bitcoin and an exact clone of bitcoin you would give a 1:1 token and they would do the same.
If you were to convert between Bitcoin and 5 tinycoins that are worth 1/5th:
1. Each tinycoin and bitcoin would be in a package with a multiplier.
2. 5 1:1 tokens from the tinycoin chain would be combined into 1 5:1 token.
3. 1 1:1 token from the bitcoin chain would be extracted and compared with the 5:1 token from the tinycoin chain.
4. #3 causes the 1 1:1 token to split into 5 1:5 tokens.
5. This would cause the bitcoin block to split into 5 copies with the 1:5 token in each copy.
6. #3 causes the 5 tinycoins to become one tinycoin.
7. This causes the 1 5:1 token to become embedded in the tinycoin.

There would not be a trace within the coin block that the conversion took place. We could have a conversion record separately so that people can't just insert whatever multiplier they want. It could have been 5 tinycoins for 1 sausage coin. Any store that accepts 5 tinycoins for 1 bitcoin would accept the tinycoin with the multiplier. Similarly any store that sold candy for 1 tinycoin would not return change for a bitcoin with a 1:5 multiplier.

Any questions?

This would allow direct chain to chain trades without everyone having to have wallets in chains they don't usually work with.

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[Mushroomized]

or just have different colored bitcoins. There could be red ones, green ones, no blue ones though, and yellow ones.

[casascius]

It is unclear what problem your proposal is intended to solve.  Is this a scalability proposal?

Splitting the blockchain into multiple chains all of which depend on one another adds no useful benefit.  The ostensible reason for splitting into multiple chains is so you only have to participate in a single partition of the peer-to-peer network (e.g. a region) so people within the same partition can trade with a lower resource cost than trading with people in a different partition.

But any process put in place to provide seamless automatic exchange across the partitions fails in the event of a double-spending attack - and the only way to protect oneself from the attack is to monitor each and all of the exchangeable chains, completely negating the benefit of separating the chains in the first place.

[NASDAQEnema]

the only way to trade on the chains rather than an exchange is through cross chain contracts. this is a nice thing to have, but with the kind of drama going on, people will be stuck between a drama chain and a train wrecked fiat currency. they will fork, they will create regional chains, they will just decide to go blockchain but avoid the associated derp of some chains. people do that when they have to have something and it's well you know prickly.

we will end up with either conversion centers (thieves in the temple) or everybody having to have 100 wallets.

it is the tendency of systems to separate and join as they evolve.

instead we should have a conversion scheme where the transaction record shows blocks with coins that have natural value (the chain value), the multiplier value (from the conversion), and the current value (what was traded with and locked to). you would just need a conversion chain where these conversions would be recorded and looked up.

now the funny thing is you could just leave the current value void. you trade 5 tinycoins for 1 sausage coin and it just so happens 5 tinycoins is now also 1 btc but sausage coins are .5 btc so it floats and trades with the 1 btc. you can decide whether to lock the currency or just have the multiplier. this would smooth out trading as it would allow chain hopping when chains have similar multipliers.