Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Smart contracts on Bitcoin

avc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 246 posts

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#81

Post by DennisP »

gruez wrote: post #18
malux85 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh for the love of science, GIVE IT A REST. ETC exists, if you don’t like ETH go use ETC, the community voted with their wallets, ETH won, give it a bone already

>the community voted with their wallets, ETH won, give it a bone already Isn't this the exact problem? That the blockchain isn't actually immutable and community will step in to revert transactions?

It happened when Ethereum was less than a year old. The hack exploited a vulnerability that was arguably systemic, since it also existed in a lot of the sample code on ethereum.org.

When Bitcoin was a little more than a year old, it reverted five hours of transactions after a bug exploit.

Both blockchains have matured since then and don't do that anymore. An Ethereum cofounder's company lost over $100M in ETH, and the community refused its requests to restore funds with a fork.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#82

Post by muneeb »

jzer0cool wrote: post #78

Just a look through the docs this all reads much better than ethereum. For give me as I am still new to the rapid new things happening in this space. What's is the ballpark transaction cost? Also, I was curious what made it difficult to have smart contracts in bitcoin in the first place? I wasn't quite sure why others were not simply having done smart contracts like ethereum and hope to be better educated the solutio…

Good question!

Bitcoin has limited scripting language (Bitcoin script) for security reasons. Having a general smart contract language could open up a larger attack surface area for Bitcoin.

The transaction costs will be low initially as they're a function of network traffic. The main thing here is to decouple scaling of transaction (as miroblocks on Stacks chain) from the scalability of Bitcoin (and Bitcoin is hard/impossible to change).

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#83

Post by vmception »

sktrdie wrote: 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.

Typically when I see that said, its impossible to tell if someone genuinely has no idea or if they have a comprehensive view but move the goal post of “use case” for arbitrary reasons

Do you want to be inspired and be part of that ecosystem, or do you want to drone on about how you could do any example use case some other irrelevant way that nobody can interact with

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#84

Post by iso8859-1 »

noman-land wrote: post #69
dperfect wrote: post #54

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.

They can't be about IRL things because those things cannot be verified in a decentralized manner.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#85

Post by Acrobatic_Road »

sktrdie wrote: 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.

* decentralized DNS (ENS) which supports IPFS

* privacy technology (tornado cash, AZTEC)

* DeFi (MakerDAO, Uniswap, Compound, Augur, etc)

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#87

Post by iso8859-1 »

muneeb wrote: post #12
DennisP wrote: post #6

Moving bitcoins to Stacks is easy, since Stacks reads the Bitcoin chain. But how do you move them from Stacks back to the Bitcoin main chain? Since Bitcoin clients aren't aware of Stacks, it's difficult to see how that would work without trusting someone to issue the correct transaction. I looked over the Stacks site and didn't see a clear answer to this question.

Muneeb here, Stacks co-founder. Great question. You are right that Clarity smart contracts have direct visibility into Bitcoin, so you can write a contract that has logic triggered by pure Bitcoin transactions. Moving Bitcoin to Stacks is a bit more complicated and there are several ways: a) Wrapped assets. Tokensoft + Anchorage (custodian) have a solution that they're calling xBTC where a "wrapped Bitcoin" is issued…

Bitcoin to Stacks is supposed to be the easy part...

The question was about how you move Stacks to Bitcoin.

I take from this handwaving answer that it isn't actually possible.

Or let's rephrase the question in Bitcoin terms: While the BTC are locked up on the Bitcoin blockchain, which key is necessary to unlock them? Surely one controlled by Blockstack, no?

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#88

Post by gruez »

kylebenzle wrote: post #39
gruez wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>From day one Bitcoin was designed to have low or no fees How are miners supposed to be compensated, given that the block reward halves every few years? >because Blockstream was able to wrestle control of the GitHub repo Can you rebut these counter-claims made by one of the Core devs? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25566420 >is a broken system designed to enrich developers of "Second Layer" solutions like this.…

> How are miners supposed to be compensated, given that the block reward halves every few years? A solved problem by Satoshi. The block reward covers miners expenses for the next 100 years or so, THEN, once the block size is large enough and transactions are in the millions, a fee of a few cents per transaction replaces the block reward. > Can you rebut these counter-claims made by one of the Core devs? Yes, easily.…

>Yes, easily. This article [1] shows what I am saying, Core devs are funded by Blockstream.

You clearly didn't read the linked comment because the article doesn't have anything to do with the arguments presented.

>Lightning does not work. It is a centralized "solution" to a decentralized problem. Sure, anyone can make a central database, hold Bitcoin and trade them, that is just an exchange, that is what Lightning is.

How is lightning centralized? You can transact with anyone you want, and you maintain a "tab" with them, which can ultimately be settled up on the blockchain. You can also route payments to anyone else on the network.

>What Blockstream is selling is not Lightning, their product is called Liquid.

Okay, how are they monetizing it?

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#89

Post by agumonkey »

Who here things blockchain as a planet wide computing system will take over the world ?

I had a feeling that this would be the actual shift in use of computing. Unlike the e-commerce, cloud .. which are structurally similar to the previous world.

I'm not preaching for blockchains, it was just a feeling that it could be an actual paradigm shift.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#90

Post by dylkil »

muneeb wrote: post #22
x3sphere wrote: post #20

I remember Counterparty (XCP) tried something like this a long time ago. Not full blown smart contracts, but things like asset creation (tokens) and decentralized exchanges like on Ethereum. Anyway at the time they received a lot of pushback from some Bitcoin core devs and some threatened to block them over their use of OP_RETURN. Wonder how sustainable Stacks approach is in comparison? Don't know if it works the sam…

We received some push back for Stacks 1.0 as well! And for similar reasons i.e., you don't want to put a lot of additional data into the Bitcoin blockchain (makes it much harder to scale Bitcoin that way). This was the primary reason why for Stacks 2.0, a hard design requirement was to make absolutely no changes to Bitcoin and to not put additional data in Bitcoin. With Stacks thousands of STX transactions result in…

So stacks is a separate network with its own consensus layer where a random miner from the bitcoin main chain is selected to write the next block, have i got that right?

What happens when they write something the rest of the stacks network disagrees with?

Post reply on HN