Adam Back: Creating Altcoins More Attractive Than Building on Bitcoin

Bitcoin technology pioneer Adam Back explained at the Transylvania Crypto Conference that there's a greater financial incentive to creating altcoins compared to building on Bitcoin.

Forbes reported Back's remarks on Oct. 21, noting that he is also the co-author of the "Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains" paper about Bitcoin sidechains released about five years ago.

In the document, he and his fellow researchers first expressed the idea that Bitcoin's sidechains will have substantial advantages over altcoins.

It is worth mentioning that Back's Blockstream is the company that launched the Liquid Bitcoin sidechain.

During the aforementioned conference, Back explained that - despite five years already passing since the sidechains proposal - he still believes that Bitcoin's sidechains will diminish the appeal of altcoins in the long run.

Back explained that sidechains could bring the features of altcoins to Bitcoin, but that economic incentives decrease the motivation to develop such systems.

Creating an altcoin is simply more profitable than developing a sidechain with no new crypto asset.

Blockstream mathematician Andrew Poelstra previously expressed the idea that bleeding edge cryptography Zero-Knowledge Proofs may eventually enable better sidechains.

"That's an enormous proof, and all of the current proof systems are orders of magnitude away from being able to do that, and some of them make experimental security assumptions. Maybe the bulletproof-like security and scalability will improve enough, and then we can make general, fully-secure sidechains just by having the main chain block verify a list of them. That would be very nice."

As Cointelegraph recently reported, almost $77 million of Bitcoin is currently locked in the network's sidechains.