The SteemIt SideChain looks so simple to use in code, could it really be that easy?

It seems that I'm getting kind of addicted to the wonders in the Steem realm. While I was roaming around from post to reply, voting up here and there, I started to dig deeper into API's and the howtos and the whatnots. Don't pull HTML and parse it, use the API, like Luke uses the force. Piston is cool, websocketd rocks and the steemjs lib does a great job.

And then I thought that I wanted to compile at least the Steem CLI wallet. What got me to the SteemIt github again. And there it was, like developer Dan had announced in a kind of teasing post: THE SIDECHAIN FILE! FOW!!! This was exciting, it is real, it is there, in code:

Outtakes of the sidechain.hpp file:

..
namespace steemit { namespace sidechain {
..
FC_REFLECT( sidechain_transfer_operation, (sidechain)(from)(to)(amount)(memo) )
..
FC_REFLECT_DERIVED( steemit::sidechain::side_account, (graphene::db::object),
(sidechain)(name)(steem_balance)(dollar_balance)
..

The complete code can be found at GitHub

Had left my mind wandering about how these SideChains would be implemented. And the crazy idea started to emerge about how a post itself could become a SubChain. Where the title could be some kind of genesis code, base64 encoded, bla bla bla, jada jada jada. The body text in the main post would not have to be human readable, it could be compressed byte code. And one would have a maximum of 24 hours to debug it, the length of a round. Kind of exciting idea... The replies would function likewise, connecting to the main genesis post and one could do just about anything with it.

Dreams, dreams, dreams

In the first post and the replies it could start off with a unique identifier, to let blog creators know they'd not need to bother losing parsing time on this one. Well, far fetched and weird, I know, but sometimes from these kind of brainstorms actually comes something usefull. And one thing where I got stuck in this whole wicked idea, that could be well used with the API, was where the payments would come in. Something could be done with Public Key encryption, where there is not only a password, but also an extra 8 figure nonce code. This would make a look-up-table password guess more difficult. But it would only work for members of the main chain at SteemIt.

And even if this kind of could have some use to it. Maybe for implementing it into a Wordpress driven Blog, an online Photoalbum or even somehow connected to Twitter, it was not what my real idea of a SubChain would be.

Sidechain with it's own accounts

So there it was, stared it right in the face, the code of Dan the man himself. Every SideChain will become a SteemIt realm of it's own, including it's own unique set of accounts... FOW! And it is still mind boggling to me, but I think this is going to turn things up a notch or two, soon. Can you imagine what would be possible with this?

Steem's getting more and more of an exciting adventure.