Blockstream's Big Mistake

A. Summary Blockstream’s 2014 paper Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains may have inadvertently been the largest setback in the history of Bitcoin. We still suffer under it, today! It contains a disastrous section – 4.3 – which has crippled the Bitcoin intelligentsia ever since. It probably set Bitcoin back 10 years (or more), by unfairly maligning the sidechain – Bitcoin’s most…