Scaling Bitcoin with Subchains

The author discusses merge-mining and proposes an alternative incentive structure for validating children chains. Rather than using merge-mining, the parent chain would include the hashes of its children's headers as transactions inside its blocks, providing an incentive for parents to validate their children by collecting fees from them for including those transactions. The author intends to further consider this proposal. Another participant in the discussion suggests that some kind of treechain-like sidechain or subchain may be a more effective and decentralized scaling solution, but no solid design has been developed yet. The original author argues that their proposal does solve the miner decentralization problem by only allowing direct parent and children chains to be merge mined, rather than all chains. They suggest that in the future, the block size limit could be increased through a soft fork with sidechains.