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Smart contracts on Bitcoin

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Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#131

Post by garmaine »

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #130
josh2600 wrote: post #118

Edit 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…

He has no idea what he is talking about.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#133

Post by josh2600 »

ryebit wrote: post #129
josh2600 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

To be clear, I wasn't asserting that Eth was less valuable as a result of the DAO reorg (quite the contrary actually). I was merely pointing out that a reorg occurred.

Thank you for the education on the bitcoin reorg, I didn't actually know that and agree that it's orthogonal to the trust narrative now.

My broad point was that the trust is not in the code, it's in the community and their policies.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#134

Post by everfree »

muneeb wrote: post #15
seibelj wrote: post #2

On a first skim it looks like a bespoke blockchain that commits its state to the bitcoin blockchain to ensure finality. Seems kind of neat, but I wouldn't call it "smart contracts on bitcoin".

The smart contracts part comes with Clarity lang: https://clarity-lang.org/ Clarity contracts have direct visibility into Bitcoin state and can write logic against that.

How useful is it to have a read-only glass window into Bitcoin that your smart contracts can look through?

The only practical application I can think of is atomic swaps, which can be accomplished any number of other, easier ways.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#135

Post by josh2600 »

garmaine wrote: post #131
eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

He has no idea what he is talking about.

I talked to a friend in 2010 who claimed that some opcodes could cause transactions to appear as valid on the chain but not actually result in the movement of funds to the targeted address. I realize now that I have not done the work to validate those claims beyond that conversation and will retract my statement until I speak to him.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#136

Post by everfree »

piercebot wrote: post #63

The Clarity language spec of these contracts is very interesting; seems like a very easy spec to keep in your head compared with Solidity. https://clarity-lang.org

Compared to Solidity, yes. But compared to Vyper, the other big Ethereum language (and also a decidable language), I don't personally see any advantage. I could be wrong, though.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#137

Post by terse_malvolio »

px43 wrote: post #117
exabrial wrote: post #111

Please, 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.

Subsidize? I think it's the opposite. Mining parasitizes on the cheapness of electric power.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#138

Post by everfree »

xur17 wrote: post #123
everfree wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally, I'd rather trust an established blockchain plus a decentralized custodian system than trust a fledgling blockchain.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#139

Post by rglullis »

gruez wrote: post #108
rglullis wrote: post #107

Earlier 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?

How do you get people to vote in a way that actually decentralized and trustless? IOW, how do you build consensus about what the total vote count is?

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#140

Post by qixxiq »

Following the links down a hole a little bit I saw this statement: "Bitcoin is by far the largest and most secure blockchain"[1]

Sure it's the largest, but it seems ETH2 might now be the most secure. It (at current prices) has $2,400,000,000 staked in the network. Sure this is still in the league of nation states to corrupt, but the penalties for breaking the rules are _so much higher_.

Given that, and the fact that Ethereum is based around smart contracts, I find it hard to believe that this could compete with ETH2.

[1] https://blog.blockstack.org/realizing-web-3-proof-of-transfe...

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