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Smart contracts on Bitcoin

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Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#101

Post by toomuchtodo »

dperfect wrote: post #76
noman-land wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cool - glad you brought up the smart lock example. How does that work without trusting (presumably off-chain) software/firmware to honor the change as to who should be able to open the lock? The smart contract might be iron-clad in showing who should have access, but at some point, that has to be interpreted and executed by a real-world entity, human or machine. In other words, standard contracts work just fine (with…

Your assessment is accurate. Crypto proponents paper over this, but don’t have an answer.

The part they say quietly is that the ledger supersedes the law and legal framework, and that’s clearly not how governments and their legal frameworks work.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#102

Post by student2k »

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…

Sad to ear all that kind of stories, Governance is a real issue of bitcoin, and it is only gone get worst. I am OK with it, you just have to assume nothing will ever change with bitcoin.... ...as long as there is another place for changes happen. If you want change stuff you need governance, take a look at decred.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#104

Post by eco »

robcohen wrote: post #30
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

Well the true genius of Eth was making choosing the fork the default option. So no, there isn't evidence that the community intended to accept the fork.

The default option was chosen by community vote. http://v1.carbonvote.com/

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#105

Post by xur17 »

bjoernw wrote: post #29

So this assumes there is pent-up demand to use BTC as part of smart contracts that is not yet met by WBTC on Ethereum. I don't see anything that would validate that assumption.

Use of WBTC requires you to trust an intermediary to hold your BTC, not exactly the same as native BTC smart contracts.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#106

Post by cheaprentalyeti »

uncletammy wrote: post #56
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…

I came here to say that. Here's a super informative thread laying out those events from the perspective of one of the Decred developers. https://old.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pi... TLDR: Smart contracts on BTC were intentionally strangled because it would necessitate bigger blocks. At the same time, BTC core devs were gearing up to start their sad push in creating artificial scarcity on a perfectl…

At the moment the Bitcoin blockchain size is some 310 gb while the bitcoin cash blockchain, with its larger blocks, is some 180 gb. I just looked it up.

(I think I looked it up the last time I saw this argument too.)

(I also can't easily find it for BSV, the search turned up too many articles about how they're increasing their block size to 2 GB.)

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#107

Post by rglullis »

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?

Blockchain is just the tech to get consensus, consensus built by a community can change and does not have to be immutable.

So no, not a problem unless you are a fundamentalist.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#108

Post by gruez »

rglullis wrote: post #107
gruez wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Blockchain is just the tech to get consensus , consensus built by a community can change and does not have to be immutable. So no, not a problem unless you are a fundamentalist.

Why bother with an "immutable" ledger then? Why not just have people vote on what the current state of the network?

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#109

Post by noman-land »

dperfect wrote: post #76
noman-land wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cool - glad you brought up the smart lock example. How does that work without trusting (presumably off-chain) software/firmware to honor the change as to who should be able to open the lock? The smart contract might be iron-clad in showing who should have access, but at some point, that has to be interpreted and executed by a real-world entity, human or machine. In other words, standard contracts work just fine (with…

That's definitely a good example of where things get tricky, but smart contracts are not a dispute resolution mechanism, they're part of a shared infrastructure.

If you use a smart contract you don't need to maintain any sort of backend at all. Your infrastructure costs are basically zero because they're baked into the cost of using the contract, which is paid on every transaction. You also get interoperability for free without having to build out any sort of API layer.

Smart contracts are not the solution to all problems but I think they have some really interesting use cases.

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