BIP-300 biff: Debate reignites over years-old Bitcoin Drivechain proposal
A debate has reignited among Bitcoiners over a six-year-old Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) to add “sidechains” on top of the network, with some warning it could increase scams on the Bitcoin network and others saying it will bring new users of the cryptocurrency.
Meanwhile, one developer claims to have found a way to achieve the proposal’s goal without a soft fork of the blockchain.
The proposal in question, BIP-300 — also known as Bitcoin (BTC) Drivechains — was first introduced in 2017, which proposed introducing “sidechains” that are separate blockchains on top of the Bitcoin network.
Paul Sztorc, the proposal’s author and founder of the Drivechain development firm LayerTwo Labs — which raised $3 million in December — has explained that the blockchains would allow for BTC to move onto them and create altcoins.
This is how Bip300 can eliminate all crypto and fiat transactions, leaving only Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/1TwQsu9ZPj
The debate over the proposal was kicked up again on Aug. 22, when a Bitcoin core developer known as Luke Dashjr rewrote the proposal’s code and requested to add it to Bitcoin’s codebase.
BIP-300 would require a soft fork of Bitcoin that would be activated by miners — not unlike the Taproot soft fork in November 2021 that paved the way for the equally controversial nonfungible tokenemulating Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens that launched earlier this year.
On Sept. 10, Maxim Orlovsky, the CEO of blockchain scaling solutions project Pandora, posted on X (Twitter) claiming he was able to create a two-way peg on Bitcoin without a soft fork of the blockchain, which BIP-300 requires.
Just understood that one can do cryptoeconomically-safe trustless 2WP on #Bitcoin without any softfork today - using Prometheus -
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