See Drivechain for an introduction. Here we'll just have a list of reasons why miners would not steal:
- they will lose future fees from that specific drivechain: you can discount all future fees and condense them into a single present number in order to do some mathematical calculation.
- they may lose future fees from all other Drivechains, if the users assume they will steal from those too.
- Bitcoin will be devalued if they steal, because:
- Bitcoin is worth more if it has Drivechains working, because it is more useful, has more use-cases, more users. Without Drivechains it necessarily has to be worth less.
- Bitcoin has more fee revenue if has Drivechains working, which means it has a bigger chance of surviving going forward and being more censorship-resistant and resistant to State attacks, therefore it has to worth more if Drivechains work and less if they don't.
- Bitcoin is worth more if the public perception is that Bitcoin miners are friendly and doing their work peacefully instead of being a band of revolted peons that are constantly threating to use their 75% hashrate to do evil things such as:
- double-spending attacks;
- censoring of transactions for a certain group of people;
- selfish mining.
- if Bitcoin is devalued its price is bound to fall, meaning that miners will lose on
- their future mining rewards;
- their ASIC investiment;
- the same coins they are trying to steal from the drivechain.
- if a mining pool tries to steal, they will risk losing their individual miners to other pools that don't.
- whenever a steal attempt begins, the coins in the drivechain will lose value (if the steal attempt is credible their price will drop quite substantially), which means that if a coalition of miners really try to steal, there is an incentive for another coalition of miners to buy some devalued coins and then stop the steal.