A Bitcoin developer has proposed a new way to provide more meaningful off-chain smart contracts for Bitcoin (BTC) without the need for a soft fork.
As announced in an October 9 white paper titled “BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin” by ZeroSync project lead Robin Linus, BitVM enables Turing-full Bitcoin contracts without changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules.
“Any computable function can be verified on Bitcoin”https://t.co/Itf9UHos0C pic.twitter.com/CLQv49Ydsg
— яobin linus (@robin_linus) October 9
A Turing-complete system is a system that can theoretically provide an answer to any computational problem.
With BitVM, the “logic” of Bitcoin contracts would be executed off-chain, but verification would be done on Bitcoin – similar to Ethereum’s bullish rollups.
BitVM’s architecture is based on fraud proof and a challenge-response model, where a “verifier” can make claims and a “verifier” can perform fraud proof to penalize the verifier if false claims are made.
Linus explained that Bitcoin in its current form is limited to basic operations such as signatures, time locks and hashlocks – but these can now be extended with BitVM, which Linus said can compute a variety of interesting applications.
“Possible applications include games such as chess, Go or poker and in particular checking proof of validity in Bitcoin contracts.”
“In addition, it could be possible to connect BTC to foreign chains, build a prediction market or emulate novel opcodes,” said Linus.
Linus said a limitation of the model is that it is limited to a two-party environment with a validator and a verifier, and that running programs requires a significant amount of off-chain computation and communication.
Linus said the next “milestone” would be the full implementation of BitVM in addition to Tree++ – a high-level programming language for writing and debugging Bitcoin contracts.
BitVM is made possible by the Taproot soft fork that took place in November 2021.
Contributing to the eight-page white paper, Linus cited Ethereum research on optimistic rollups and a study on Merkle Trees.
Bitcoiners react to BitVM
Prominent Bitcoiner Eric Wall posted on
Bitcoin analyst Dylan LeClair is also impressed by BitVM’s white paper. But Adam Back, a Bitcoin Core employee, suggested that people shouldn’t get too excited about the development just yet.
For people who are (over)excited, that’s cool, but it’s basically a generalization of a two-party game – it’s called it in the abstract – so it’s a bit similar to Greg Maxwell’s example of implementing conditional ZKP payments from 2016 https://t.co/ OeHRsbFjud
– Adam Back (@adam3us) October 9, 2023
Related: BIP-300-Biff: Debate over years-old Bitcoin drivechain proposal flares up again
“Dotta,” a developer in the blockchain space, noted that there is already a proof of concept on GitHub.
Another
“After all, this is opt-in. If you don’t trust your coins to be tied to a full Turing contract (totally reasonable), then don’t tie them to a full Turing smart contract. One of [the] The beauty of the UTXO system is the security sandboxing.”
Others like “psage” say that BitVM adds to the list of things that will drive the price of Bitcoin higher in the next bull market.
The bullish things around #Bitcoin are increasing, many of them are controversial, but a few of them caught my eye:
– BitVM
– Ordinal numbers
– Several Pres candidates are talking about this
-ETF
– Halving
– Privacy improvements
– Exponential increase in hash rate
– Countries Mining
….
– psage (@perspiringsage) October 9, 2023
Cointelegraph contacted Linus for comment but did not receive an immediate response.
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