How Two New Sidechains Proposals Could Change Bitcoin’s DNA

A long-proposed bitcoin feature called ‘sidechains’ may soon take a big step forward thanks to a pair of proposals.
The idea behind sidechains, most associated with the startup Blockstream (whose team boasts its originators), is to make it easier to add new features to bitcoin, something that’s proven difficult in the past.
In short, sidechains are supposed to make it possible for users to move bitcoins between different blockchains with different rule sets. For example, in this way, new techniques for preserving the privacy of transactions or a smart contract system similar to ethereum‘s could be added to a bitcoin blockchain, without changing the bitcoin blockchain.
Bitcoin security consultant Sergio Demian Lerner, who is spearheading one effort to add sidechain functionality to bitcoin, explained that sidechains would broadly remove the difficulty developers today face in expanding bitcoin’s capabilities.

This post was published at Coin Desk on November 10, 2016.