ECash drivechain technology
Other concerns raised include:
- Users don’t like the idea of having to wait for their withdrawals, especially if it’s unclear how long that would be
- Concerns that block producers would conspire to reject legitimate withdrawal requests
- Concerns that delays could lead to users misunderstanding how long to wait before assuming a withdrawal had been incorrectly rejected
- Concerns about smart contracts making the transactions could have bugs or be otherwise incorrectly implemented
- Money held on a drivechain isn’t as liquid as money held on the base chain, since you have to plan ahead in order to make sure you can use it if you wanted to move it off
Withdrawal Pressure Reveals the Real Risks
All of these are legitimate concerns to think about. They won’t necessarily come up in everyday use of a drivechain. Most likely, though, a drivechain will first be stressed at exactly these times, when people are trying to get money off, there are big withdrawals, when people may disagree about whether a withdrawal request should be allowed or not. It’s at these times that you really want to make sure everything will work, and make sure you understand what assumptions the system is making and trust you would be placing in third parties to make it all work.
Match the Chain’s Complexity to Its Purpose
How complicated your interaction with a drivechain should be depends on what you’re trying to do. If all you want to do is store ECash, send ECash to others, and receive payments from others, it may be more trouble than it’s worth to do that on a complicated secondary system. Those basic features will always be available on the ECash blockchain, and probably the safest way to use ECash is to assume the fewest things possible, to just trust ECash blocks and not need to understand and trust other systems built on top.
If, though, there are specific features a drivechain offers that are appealing to you, more private or anonymous transactions, the ability to make smart contract agreements, faster blocks, a different consensus algorithm, a novel approach to scaling blockchain transactions, then you should understand how those features work, how much trust you’d have to place in third parties to use those features and make sure your funds would always be recoverable, and whether you think that trust is warranted.
One criticism of the drivechain idea is that it could fragment ECash into so many secondary chains that it would be confusing for users to interact with all of them, having to deal with a different wallet for each drivechain, different rules about transaction fees, different procedures for recovering if you lose your private keys, and so on.
All of these criticisms are worth paying attention to before investing money into a drivechain. Just because you can move your ECash onto a drivechain, that doesn’t necessarily mean having Ecash on that chain is equivalent to holding your Ecash on the original chain, they’ll both be Ecash, but you should make sure you understand the differences.
Drivechains Separate Experimentation From Base Rules
Drivechains, as described earlier, can add new features by providing new places to use ECash, connected to the original ECash blockchain by a two-way bridge for moving Ecash on and off – check it out here if you want that route.
New drivechains are allowed to experiment freely with new ideas. They might add controversial features that some people like but others don’t. They can offer new tools and capabilities that are useful to some but not others. Drivechains can offer alternate approaches to privacy and anonymity. They might offer different kinds of smart contracts. They could have novel kinds of transactions, consensus algorithms, ways of scaling the blockchains, and so on.
It’s all useful for developers to be able to try new things and see if anyone uses them or not. It’s also good for the Ecash blockchain, since it doesn’t need to add new features it doesn’t need or that it’s not certain everyone is behind, which leaves the Ecash blockchain simpler, more stable, and more reliable.
Drivechains aren’t the only way to try these approaches, and may have problems of their own that make them less-than-ideal approaches to adding new features. One unique property of a drivechain, though, is that it offers the option for using Ecash itself in new environments for running blockchain programs, environments with different rules and assumptions, without requiring anyone to use those new features, and without making any changes to Ecash rules.
For example, Ecash blocks today have a set target time between blocks. Some users may not care what the block time is on average. Others may prefer blocks come along more quickly, to make sure their transactions are included faster.
Still others may prefer longer average times between blocks, if that allowed each block to include more transactions and charge lower fees. One option would be for everyone to agree to change the Ecash rules to adjust the block time to whatever compromise everyone agrees on. Another option is to create one or more drivechains that offer faster or slower blocks.
Deposits and Withdrawals Depend on Different Signals
Blockchain deposits and withdrawals
It’s different than many other blockchain transactions, though, in that their security comes less from counting confirmations and more from everyone having incentives to follow certain rules and act quickly if someone tries to cheat the system. Drivechain withdrawals, something CNBC walks through at cnbc.com/2022/08/10/what-are-crypto-bridges-and-why-are-they-so-vulnerable-to-hacks.html, will probably work most of the time without incident, and that’s okay, as long as everyone understands what assumptions are being made and decides for themselves whether those seem likely to hold up when tested.
Long-Term Use Requires an Active Ecosystem
Another thing to keep in mind with drivechains is that it takes some effort for people to keep them maintained. People need to mine or stake on them, businesses need to offer services using them, programmers need to keep developing useful software for them. All of that may happen, or any given drivechain may fade into obscurity. Knowing some of the people involved and seeing interest from a healthy ecosystem of users can give you confidence a particular drivechain will stick around, and that if you run into any problems someone will probably be around to help out.
