Drivechain

From the combination of

Hashrate Escrows

A mechanism defined by BIP300 that allows people to send money to specific sidechain "buckets" on the mainchain, and then block producers to vote over a long period of 3~6 months to authorize withdrawals back from that bucket. There is also an alternative, compatible proposal.

and

Blind Merged Mining

A mechanism that allows a sidechain to anchor itself on the Bitcoin chain (therefore not needing any proof-of-work of its own) while also pushing the sum of all its block fees into a single Bitcoin transaction that can be earned by Bitcoin block producers without them even knowing. It can be implemented using either this simple method that uses BIP118 or the more involved BIP301 method.

Drivechain is born.

Drivechain is the technique for the creation of decentralized 2-way peg sidechains for Bitcoin. These sidechains can be used to improve Bitcoin in every front, including privacy, scalability, decentralization and security, and also add many interesting features not possible before that can make the world better and continue the revolution started by Satoshi Nakamoto. Join us!

Watch this on YouTube, or see slides and transcript.

Things to read or watch

From Paul Sztorc:

From others:

How does Drivechain improve...

Possible Sidechains

A list of some good candidates of things that can be enabled as sidechains once BIP300 is activated on Bitcoin.

Community Opinions

Important people and what they think about Drivechain.

Adam Back 🟩 "Yes, of course!"
Luke Dashjr ⬜️ "I'm neutral on drivechain."
Mr Hodl ⬜️ "I personally don't really care. There are other people who are against them."
Giacomo Zucco 🟩 "I like Drivechain"
Eric Wall 🟩 "Yeah, I like drivechains better."
Robin Linus 🟩 "I think the exciting thing about Drivechains is bip300, which solves the 2-way peg."
Anton Kumaigorodski 🟩 "Here's another project which I think is more critical than LN for bitcoin's long term survival."
Jimmy Song 🟩 "The good news is that Drivechains don’t require (less) trusted entities and the code is almost done. The bad news is that Drivechains require a soft fork."
Rusty Russell 🟩 "The nice thing about Drivechains is that they're isolated, right? You don't have to use it if you don't want to, they exist and it doesn't damage Bitcoin in any way. So from like a high level I'm broadly supportive, but, I'm not in the weeds and can't give any like deep technical critiques."
Sergio Demian Lerner 🟩 "I hope Bitcoin someday soft-forks to add Drivechain"
Hasu 🟩 "Drivechain: good"
Hampus 🟩 "My favorite solution for this is Drivechains BIP300/301 + an interoperable Lightning Network."
calle 🟩 "I support BIP-300!"
Peter Todd πŸŸ₯ "Just use an alt currency."
John Carvalho πŸŸ₯ "Sidechains are inferior to altcoins."
Sjors Provoost πŸŸ₯ "I'm worried it will bring politics and drama from altcoins to Bitcoin. This doesn't happen today because since altcoins are viable the drama people go there and have their drama."
Ben, the Carman πŸŸ₯ "There's a million other ways to do side chains, I don't see why we need to soft fork another way in"
Torkel Rogstad 🟩 "We desperately need to take a long and hard look in the mirror, and start doing things differently. I think starting a more serious and thorough discussion about BIP300 (Drivechain) is the right place to start. "
Metamick 🟩 "If you do the research, it makes so much sense to do drivechains."

Drivechain Implementation and Testnet

Visit the Releases page on drivechain.info or this directory.

There is a video tutorial for using zSide and a Drivenet written tutorial with many screenshots and a tutorial specific for adding sidechains.