A New Way to Enhance Bitcoin Contracts
A Bitcoin developer has proposed a groundbreaking solution to enable more expressive off-chain smart contracts for Bitcoin (BTC) without the need for a soft fork. Robin Linus, ZeroSync’s project lead, announced the development in an Oct. 9 white paper titled "BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin". BitVM allows for the execution of Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts off-chain while maintaining verification on the Bitcoin network, similar to Ethereum’s optimistic rollups.
Expanding Bitcoin's Capabilities
BitVM's architecture is based on fraud proofs and a challenge-response model, enabling a "prover" to make claims and a "verifier" to perform a fraud-proof to penalize false claims. Linus explained that Bitcoin's current form is limited to basic operations, but with BitVM, a wide range of applications can be computed. This includes games like Chess, Go, and Poker, as well as verification of validity proofs in Bitcoin contracts. Linus also mentions the possibility of bridging BTC to foreign chains, building a prediction market, or emulating novel opcodes.
The Limitations and Future Milestones
Linus acknowledged that BitVM is currently limited to a two-party setting, with a prover and a verifier, and that a significant amount of off-chain computation and communication is required to execute programs. The next milestone is to fully implement BitVM, along with Tree++ – a high-level programming language designed to write and debug Bitcoin contracts.
The Response from the Bitcoin Community
Bitcoin enthusiasts have responded with both excitement and caution. Prominent Bitcoiner Eric Wall expressed enthusiasm and curiosity about the real-world experiments that may arise from BitVM. Bitcoin analyst Dylan LeClair was also impressed with BitVM's white paper. However, Bitcoin Core contributor Adam Back advised against getting too excited about the development, likening it to a two-party game. Another builder in the blockchain space pointed out that there is already a proof-of-concept available on GitHub.
Addressing concerns from Bitcoin maximalists, a user named Sam Parker reassured that BitVM is an opt-in solution and won't force Bitcoin holders to lock their coins into Turing complete contracts. The UTXO system of Bitcoin allows for security sandboxing and offers the flexibility to choose participation in these contracts.
Anticipating Bitcoin's Future
Many in the community believe that BitVM is just one of the factors that will boost Bitcoin's price in the next bull market. Along with BitVM, people are looking towards factors such as Ordinals, multiple Presidential candidates discussing Bitcoin, ETFs, halving, privacy improvements, exponential hash rate increases, and countries mining Bitcoin.
Cointelegraph reached out to Robin Linus for a comment but did not receive an immediate response.
Did you miss our previous article...
https://trendinginthenews.com/crypto-currency/china-daily-plans-to-launch-its-own-metaverse-and-nft-platform
