Please, enough with Bitcoin. It's an environmental disaster.
Smart contracts on Bitcoin
111–120 of 246 posts
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#112So 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.
What about the fact that the core ethereum team revealed that they’d reverse a smartcontract with a hard fork when members of the core team make an expensive mistake in one while bitcoin has no such culture?
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's value in digitizing 90% of the process and relying on as few oracles as possible. Right now your contracts are enforced by fallible, highly paid interpreters (lawyers) executing source code in printed form.
Right now contracts are enforced by lawyers who can interpret code that is not fully specified. I would guess that hiring a contract developer to create a water-tight contract the computer is capable of understanding would be much more expensive than a lawyer. This is in a similar vein to the fact that it's more expensive to have programmers create a perfect NLP app to translate something than it is to just hire a tr…
I'm sure creating the first spreadsheet application was more expensive than hiring an accountant. But not doing it 1 million times. Someone will make "contracts as a service" and competition will drive down the cost, until it's nearly free (as spreadsheets are today).
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#114Please, enough with Bitcoin. It's an environmental disaster.
So is the internet and computers and cars.
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's value in digitizing 90% of the process and relying on as few oracles as possible. Right now your contracts are enforced by fallible, highly paid interpreters (lawyers) executing source code in printed form.
Wouldn't that just make those few oracles an increasingly valuable target for manipulation/corruption?
Do you trust Amazon, Google and Microsoft or millions of sysadmins in podunk companies to secure their infrastructure?
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#116So 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.
What about the fact that the core ethereum team revealed that they’d reverse a smartcontract with a hard fork when members of the core team make an expensive mistake in one while bitcoin has no such culture?
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?
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#117Please, 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.
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#118Edit 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 Satoshi Dice.
The crazy thing is: bitcoin was ethereum.
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.
Really, I think the beginning of bitcoin jumping the shark was Satoshi Dice: https://www.coindesk.com/company/satoshidice.
Anyways, Bitcoin off-chain scripting won't replace Eth anymore than any other off-chain scripting system will replace Eth. If this kills Eth it will be because people don't want on-chain scripting, not because people want off-chain scripting on bitcoin (ergo, the meta problem is that on-chain scripting doesn't scale in every sense of the word scale; fees, tx speed, finality, etc).
Caveat emptor: it's entirely possible this company could work or take off. In crypto, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
Edit: Just to be extra clear, the problems with ethereum, to me at least, aren't actually on-chain scaling; that feels solvable. What feels unsolvable to me is two things: 1) turing completeness and 2) compilation malleability (if the compiler/machine can change but the code can't, guess what, old code's behavior becomes less predictable over time... computing systems with longevity gain minimal entropy over time).
Edit 2: The only rational way I can make sense of turing completeness and compilation malleability as features is if the ecosystem is engineering ecological behavior in, that is to say: old programs should become less valuable unless they accurately predicted the future. Maybe that's rational?
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#119So 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.
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 with a 1:1 block ratio.
Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the fact that the core ethereum team revealed that they’d reverse a smartcontract with a hard fork when members of the core team make an expensive mistake in one while bitcoin has no such culture?
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 to do soon.