Bitcoiner is dropping BitVM paper – bringing Ethereum-like contracts to Bit Cryptocurrency scrgruppen

A Bitcoin developer has proposed a new way to bring more expressive off-chain smart contracts to Bitcoin (BTC) without the need for a soft fork.

Announced in white paper October 9 Titled “BitVM: Computing Anything on Bitcoin” by Robin Linus, ZeroSync Project Leader, BitVM enables Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts without changing Bitcoin consensus rules.

“Any computable function can be verified on Bitcoin.”https://t.co/Itf9UHos0C pic.twitter.com/CLQv49Ydsg

— яobin Linus (@robin_linus) October 9, 2023

A Turing complete system is one that can theoretically provide an answer to any computational problem.

The “logic” of Bitcoin contracts is executed off-chain but is then verified on Bitcoin – similar to Ethereum optimistic pools.

BitVM’s architecture is based on a fraud proof and challenge response model where a “verifier” can make claims and a “verifier” can conduct a fraud proof to penalize the prover when making false claims.

Linus explained that Bitcoin, in its current form, is limited to basic operations, such as signatures, time locks, and hashes — but that can now be expanded with BitVM, which Linus says can compute a range of interesting applications.

“Potential applications include games like chess, Go or Poker, and especially checking validity proofs in Bitcoin contracts.”

“In addition, it may be possible to link Bitcoin to foreign chains, build a predictive market, or simulate new operating codes,” Linus said.

Linus said a limitation of the model is that it is limited to a two-party setup with a prover and verifier and that a significant amount of off-chain computation and communication is needed to execute the programs.

Linus said the next “breakthrough” is the full implementation of BitVM as well as Tree++ – a high-level programming language for writing and debugging Bitcoin contracts.

BitVM was enabled by the Taproot soft fork that occurred in November 2021.

Linus cited Ethereum research on optimistic clusters and a study on Merkle Trees in contributing to the eight-page white paper.

Bitcoiners respond to BitVM

Prominent Bitcoiner Eric Wall posted on

Bitcoin analyst Dylan LeClair is too a fan With the BitVM whitepaper. But Adam Back, a Bitcoin Core contributor Proposal That people shouldn’t be too excited about the development just yet.

For people who get (too) excited, this is great but it’s an effective generalization of the two-sided game – it’s spelled right in the abstract – so it’s a bit like Greg Maxwell’s example on the 2016 ZKP emergency payments https://t.co/OeHRsbFjud

– Adam Buck (@adam3us) October 9, 2023

Related: BIP-300 biff: Controversy over the Bitcoin Drivechain proposal has been heating up for years

One of the innovators in the blockchain space, “dotta”, male There is already a proof of concept on GitHub.

Another X user, Sam Parker, attempted to solve a common concern among Bitcoin extremists with to explain That BitVM will not force Bitcoin to “lock” these contracts.

“Finally, here’s the opt-in. If you don’t trust your coins to be locked by some (perfectly reasonable) Turing-complete contract, don’t lock them with a Turing-complete smart contract. One of [the] The beauty of the UTXO system is its security sandbox.

Others, like psage, say BitVM adds to the list of things that will push Bitcoin’s price forward in the next bull market.

Bullish things around #Bitcoin They’re growing in size, and many of them are controversial, but some of them aren’t on my fingertips:
-bitfm
-Ordinal
– Many presidential candidates are talking about this
– Traded investment funds
– Half
– Privacy improvements
– Exponential hash rate increase
– Mining countries
….

—Passage (@perspiringsage) October 9, 2023

Cointelegraph contacted Linus for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

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