Bitcoin sidechains to kill alttcoins in the long run – Adam Back

• CEO of Blockstream comments on the future of altcoins.
• Sidechain solutions will make them useless and financially impractical.  

Five years ago, on October 22, 2014, CEO of Blockstream Adam Back and a team of famous developers released the original white paper on Bitcoin sidechains. They proposed the idea that allowed Bitcoin users to move their coins between various blockchains. This solution unlocked numerous new features of cryptocurrencies and to the industry to the new level.  

Speaking at Transylvania Crypto Conference, Adam Back confirmed that sidechains would eventually make altcoins useless.  

“In the history of altcoins, it seemed like there was a period where there were a huge number of them that had no features. And that played out. And then people started to need a new way to market them, so they added features. Some of them were real features, and some of them were stories to market [their altcoins],” he said as cited by Forbes.

He believes that the modular structure of Bitcoin will allow creating various products based on top of extensions with basic functionality. As a result, the developer will be less motivated to create altcoins. However, sidechain users will have to accept a compromise over decentralization to get extended functionality.

Anywhere, according to Back, sidechains are the next level  of the industry development. He draws some parallels with the Internet, saying that thee progress of Internet development would have been too slow and disorderly if anyone could have created their own version of  TCP/IP protocol.