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Smart contracts on Bitcoin

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Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#91

Post by jstgord »

jstgord wrote: post #25

no

why no ?

Its a bad idea for the following reasons :

- Bitcoin has an artificially constrained overly small blocksize, which effectively prevents holding more data on its blockchain [ maybe BCH or another variant with a larger blocksize would work better ]

- We already have other blockchains, such as ETH, with active and working smart contract languages and tools : we need standardization

- The constrained blocksize on Bitcoin drives a high-fee market, meaning affordable smart contracts wont happen on Bitcoin

- its a massive carbon sink, and we should solve that problem before further burdening Bitcoin itself [ we burn vast amounts of electricity to solve the hash - effectively a lottery with expectation of winning proportional in Joules of electricity burnt - we need a more energy efficient form of statistically provably fair distributed lottery ]

- the long / slow block compute time of ~10 minutes means a poor user experience [ ETH is closer to ~15sec

tl;dr - ETH is already established and is a much better platform [ faster cheaper, more mature ] for smart contracts... and Bitcoin itself is burdened with a small block making this untenable.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#92

Post by sagivo »

iso8859-1 wrote: post #86
sagivo wrote: post #43

Why not using this VC money to support Ethereum? They already do that and much more.

Muneeb answered this here: https://forum.stacks.org/t/what-is-the-difference-between-bl...

> Blockstack enables users to use arbitrary storage backends like Dropbox, Amazon, Google as “dumb drives”. Only pointers to the storage backends are stored with Blockstack and encrypted/signed data is kept at storage providers.

I stopped reading after that.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#93

Post by wmf »

mason55 wrote: post #8
Acrobatic_Road wrote: post #5

We already have this. It's called WBTC and TBTC. Turns out it's way easier to port Bitcoin to Ethereum than to rebuild Ethereum on Bitcoin.

> Turns out it's way easier to port Bitcoin to Ethereum than to rebuild Ethereum on Bitcoin. Technically that might be the case but in the real world you have network effects, inertia, and all kinds of other reason why it might be desirable to go in the other direction. The ease has to be examined from the perspective of the system as a whole and not just the one component.

Stacks doesn't inherit Bitcoin's network effects except for mining security. No existing Bitcoin wallets or exchanges can make Stacks transactions, while many Ethereum wallets are flexible enough to support arbitrary tokens or smart contracts.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#94

Post by opreturn »

dylkil wrote: post #90
muneeb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Bitcoin miners have no role here. Anyone can sign up to be a Stack-miner by bringing in their own BTC into this network. That amount (in BTC) is distributed to those who have staked their Stack-tokens. A pRNG process (based on VDF or VRF) selects one of these miners at random to create the next block

Source: https://blog.blockstack.org/realizing-web-3-proof-of-transfe...

Edit: typo

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#95

Post by wmf »

Tepix wrote: post #77
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.

One of the most exciting upcoming topics on the Avalanche (sorry, not Ethereum) ecosystem is ILOs (Initial Litigation Offering). Initial Litigation Offering is a blockchain-enabled token that would give investors access to a portion of payouts from lawsuits. https://www.coinspeaker.com/first-ilo-launches-avalanche/ I think we'll see many more of these in the future.

Maybe next they can expand into Initial Narco Offerings, Initial Human Trafficking Offerings, and eventually Initial Genocide Offerings.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#96

Post by opreturn »

wmf wrote: post #93
mason55 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turns out it's way easier to port Bitcoin to Ethereum than to rebuild Ethereum on Bitcoin. Technically that might be the case but in the real world you have network effects, inertia, and all kinds of other reason why it might be desirable to go in the other direction. The ease has to be examined from the perspective of the system as a whole and not just the one component.

Stacks doesn't inherit Bitcoin's network effects except for mining security. No existing Bitcoin wallets or exchanges can make Stacks transactions, while many Ethereum wallets are flexible enough to support arbitrary tokens or smart contracts.

> except for mining security where did you see that? I don't think their security model has any connection with Bitcoin mining. They are not merged-mining with bitcoin

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#97

Post by ryanSrich »

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.

DeFi is where it's really taking off. The things we were promised in 2017 are finally starting to come around. I recommend looking at Synthetix https://www.synthetix.io/. They're doing some really cool stuff with synthetic assets.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#98

Post by thegreatpeter »

bjoernw wrote: post #40
muneeb wrote: 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?

99.9%

even the defi community will admit that 85%? of the "lending" that's taking place is to make crypto people more money lol

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#99

Post by vmception »

ryanSrich wrote: post #97
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.

DeFi is where it's really taking off. The things we were promised in 2017 are finally starting to come around. I recommend looking at Synthetix https://www.synthetix.io/ . They're doing some really cool stuff with synthetic assets.

That, and also many projects rebranded and also pivoted!

Most of them are interoperable with each other instead of trying to be unique and original, which has sparked something analogous to the Industrial Revolution over the last year.

For anyone else passing by, on the technical side, this is because of the "composability" concept coming to fruition in early 2020, the idea that outputs from one team's smart contracts can be used as the inputs for a different team's smart contracts.

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