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Smart contracts on Bitcoin

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Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#61
Bitcoiners are already using RSK for DeFi. It's compatible with Ethereum but uses BTC as native currency. There are several DeFi applications already very popular, such as Money on Chain, Soveryn and rskswap. More than 600 BTCs are locked in DeFi.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#62

I'm not sure I've gotten a clear answer to this before, so someone please help me understand: I can see how smart contracts might be useful in contracts that involve other assets that are directly connected in the same decentralized context (i.e., other bitcoin transactions or blockchain entities). However, for anything else in the real world, they always (from what I've seen) require an "oracle" of some kind. True,…

There's value in digitizing 90% of the process and relying on as few oracles as possible. Right now your contracts are enforced by fallible, highly paid interpreters (lawyers) executing source code in printed form.

Wouldn't that just make those few oracles an increasingly valuable target for manipulation/corruption?

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#65
How is consensus secured for the Stacks blockchain? Is it proof-of-work? How many nodes are there?

What is the root of trust of Stacks? Does it have auto-update? If I take over your domain, can I take all Stacks?

How can I independently verify how many mainnet coins have been locked as Stacks? How do I run a testnet node?

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#66
post #41

What kind of actual real world use-cases has ethereum's programmable "contracts" enabled? It's been out there for a while yet I fail to see where it made an impact.

I agree it's hard, outside of finance, to find interesting use cases. One use case that I personally enjoy was the use of smart contracts to enable the building of decentralized ISPs[0].

[0]: https://althea.net/

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#67
post #40
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of Bitcoin remains passively outside of smart contracts. Only about 5B on Ethereum. This can be a fairly large market and we're in early days. More use cases don't need to take anything away from Ethereum!

Maybe that's because 99% is purely held to speculate on the price going up?

In the following order of nuance, the 99% of Bitcoiners:

Don’t know about this

Don’t like the idea of any other distributed ledger attracting capital away from Bitcoin purchases

Don’t know the Ethereum platform is different than any other “altcoin”

Don’t like Ethereum based on valid or fictional criticism

Don’t like WBTC

Don’t like renBTC in its current state

Know about all of this, don't mind it, are not interested in complex transactions, are not interested in turning their bitcoin into an interest bearing asset

The growth to the 1% has been pretty good and fast! Billions of $ of BTC on this stuff over just the last two quarters. Isn’t that how every startup pitch starts? “If we just get 1% of this market ....”

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#68

I'm not sure I've gotten a clear answer to this before, so someone please help me understand: I can see how smart contracts might be useful in contracts that involve other assets that are directly connected in the same decentralized context (i.e., other bitcoin transactions or blockchain entities). However, for anything else in the real world, they always (from what I've seen) require an "oracle" of some kind. True,…

There's value in digitizing 90% of the process and relying on as few oracles as possible. Right now your contracts are enforced by fallible, highly paid interpreters (lawyers) executing source code in printed form.

Right now contracts are enforced by lawyers who can interpret code that is not fully specified.

I would guess that hiring a contract developer to create a water-tight contract the computer is capable of understanding would be much more expensive than a lawyer.

This is in a similar vein to the fact that it's more expensive to have programmers create a perfect NLP app to translate something than it is to just hire a translator. Translating english into other languages is not a solved problem. Whether that other language is french or a smart contract does'nt seem that material.

It does seem like it will be much cheaper to make contracts in bitcoin that don't require translating thousand-line-english-documents into a smart contract.

However, you can already do that without a lawyer. If me and you sign a paper saying it's a contract that "I will pay you $200 for an item delivered on date X/Y, and if you're late I pay $20 less per day it's late", that's already legal and enforceable without a lawyer.

Coding that same thing in bitcoin would be harder than writing it on a paper still I think.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#69

I'm not sure I've gotten a clear answer to this before, so someone please help me understand: I can see how smart contracts might be useful in contracts that involve other assets that are directly connected in the same decentralized context (i.e., other bitcoin transactions or blockchain entities). However, for anything else in the real world, they always (from what I've seen) require an "oracle" of some kind. True,…

Smart contracts are mathematical contracts not legal contracts. They don't even have to be about IRL things. You could interact with a smart contract to, for example, change who can be authenticated to use a smart lock. Or you could have profile information about yourself in a contract, that can be changed.
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