So it's a sidechain that ocassionally checks in it's state to bitcoin's main chain? And you can lock up BTC on the mainchain to use it on the sidechain?
Smart contracts on Bitcoin
121–130 of 246 posts
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#122I 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…
Notably, Vitalik was run out on a rail by small blockers (mostly LukeJr) when he was trying to work on smart contracts on BTC back in the day. This is the entire reason he launched Ethereum, and took with him everyone else interested in working on smart contracts.
Smart contracts are neat. Bitcoin is neat. Smart contracts on Bitcoin could have been a thing, but now it's too late. There is almost zero intersection between BTC maximalists and people who think smart contracts on BTC are a good idea.
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Use of WBTC requires you to trust an intermediary to hold your BTC, not exactly the same as native BTC smart contracts.
Native smart contracts would be cool, but Stacks is not native smart contracts. It's a separate blockchain that integrates with the Bitcoin blockchain. In other words, you are trusting the Stacks blockchain to custody your bitcoins, just like with TBTC or RENBTC or any of the other decentralized Bitcoin bridges. From their site: > Like Bitcoin, Stacks is a layer-1 blockchain. Proof of Transfer connects it to Bitcoin…
That still feels better than trusting another blockchain (ETH) and a custodian.
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, no? There are two cryptocurrencies, ETH and ETC, and apparently most people think it's fine to revert a transaction for the reason ETH reverted it. The only problem is that people posit "but it's a problem when transactions are reverted, and, look, ETH reverts transactions!", which assumes the problem even though the assumption doesn't really seem to hold.
>The only problem is that people posit "but it's a problem when transactions are reverted, and, look, ETH reverts transactions!", which assumes the problem even though the assumption doesn't really seem to hold. But if all we cared about is the "right" thing to be done at the end, why bother with smart contracts? Why not use the courts?
Smart contracts are defense in depth on top of the courts. Neither is perfectly foolproof.
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#126So it's a sidechain that ocassionally checks in it's state to bitcoin's main chain? And you can lock up BTC on the mainchain to use it on the sidechain?
In essence, yes, it's a sidechain.
From their site:
> Like Bitcoin, Stacks is a layer-1 blockchain. Proof of Transfer connects it to Bitcoin with a 1:1 block ratio.
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#127Please, enough with Bitcoin. It's an environmental disaster.
It's only economical to mine in areas with significant excess power, mostly around dams, but also wind farms and regions powered by geothermal. If anything, mining subsidizes green energy projects, and drives interest in cheaper and more efficient energy production, as well as more efficient semiconductor technologies.
I really don't think that's true except in pockets of the usa or europe with free markets (the power part)
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#128Moving 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…
Thanks for joining this thread.
What exactly do you mean by "xBTC is secured by Bitcoin itself?"
Do you mean that Stacks writes out its own block hashes to the Bitcoin blockchain, or something?
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very broad and general sentiment. Do you have the source where they talk about this, so that things can be put into context?
This is canon and dates to the original DAO. A quick google on DAO crisis should give you a bunch of reading material. Compare that to the time Binance lost $500M in BTC and contemplated doing a chain revert because it would be way cheaper than $500M but didn't because it would break the illusion that BTC tx are irreversible. BTC tx are reversible, it's just going to become prohibitively expensive for almost anyone t…
That is rather misleading to use as an example... It's widely regarded as a one time thing that was agreed upon partly because the system (and testing tools) were so new at the time.
Bitcoin had a bug that was required an organized chain reorg back when it was early as well, but it's not regarded as fatal to putting trust in the chain now (search for "bitcoin value overflow bug", was kinda interesting)
More recently, Parity, one of the main developers of one the Ethereum clients, had millions locked up due to mistake in their smart contract code. They complained loudly, tried to get another roll back, and finally gave up... The overwhelming concensus was that Ethereum is no longer alpha grade, there will be no take backs ever again.
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#130Edit 3: See my nested child comment. My understanding (from a 2010 conversation with a friend who was deep in btc) was that there was a time where bitcoin scripting could cause transactions to appear onchain that would look valid to a novice but would not actually perform the actions described such that a scam could be perpetrated. I have not done the work to validate these claims. I stand by my comments on Eth and S…
> The community killed scripting because it was antithetical to the thing that makes money in BTC: trust. The constant flow of n00bs coming in who got their transactions reversed by OP codes and said "BUT I THOUGHT BITCOIN TRANSACTIONS WERE IRREVERSIBLE!!?!?!!?!?!1111" was eroding trust in the ecosystem.
I never heard of all of this having happened. To my knowledge Bitcoin's scripting language was not trimmed, it was in fact extended over the years by various BIPs [1].
What's your source for these statements?