[HN Gopher] Smart contracts on Bitcoin
___________________________________________________________________
Smart contracts on Bitcoin
Author : rmason
Score : 86 points
Date : 2021-01-14 19:59 UTC (3 hours ago)
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| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Clarity, at least on paper, sounds way nicer than Solidity. We'll
| see how it ends.
| jxi wrote:
| They only support Chinese exchanges (and probably requires KYC).
| This thing is not gonna take off.
| dperfect wrote:
| I'm not sure I've gotten a clear answer to this before, so
| someone please help me understand:
|
| I can see how smart contracts might be useful in contracts that
| involve other assets that are directly connected in the same
| decentralized context (i.e., other bitcoin transactions or
| blockchain entities).
|
| However, for anything else in the real world, they always (from
| what I've seen) require an "oracle" of some kind. True, that can
| be based on a consensus algorithm involving multiple parties in
| the real world, but it always ends up requiring trust that those
| real-world entities are playing by the rules. If we're relying on
| the good faith of real-world entities, how is a smart contract
| any better than a legal contract (a human would have to step in
| as the arbiter in either case)?
| vmception wrote:
| For onchain purposes it can just be a matter of convenience,
| not a panacea or cure all
| ZitchDog wrote:
| It is much cheaper to execute a smart contract.
| stocknoob wrote:
| 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.
| dperfect wrote:
| Wouldn't that just make those few oracles an increasingly
| valuable target for manipulation/corruption?
| TheDong wrote:
| 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 translator.
| Translating english into other languages is not a solved
| problem. Whether that other language is french or a smart
| contract does'nt seem that material.
|
| It does seem like it will be much cheaper to make contracts
| in bitcoin that don't require translating thousand-line-
| english-documents into a smart contract.
|
| However, you can already do that without a lawyer. If me and
| you sign a paper saying it's a contract that "I will pay you
| $200 for an item delivered on date X/Y, and if you're late I
| pay $20 less per day it's late", that's already legal and
| enforceable without a lawyer.
|
| Coding that same thing in bitcoin would be harder than
| writing it on a paper still I think.
| noman-land wrote:
| 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.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| They _can 't_ be about IRL things because those things cannot
| be verified in a decentralized manner.
| dperfect wrote:
| 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 (without
| any lawyers involved) when everything goes to plan. It's the
| failure cases that matter, and it's not hard to imagine a
| compromised lock (or an entire company's locks if they're
| connected to the internet for access to the blockchain) that
| no longer respect the smart contract. So you're back to
| calling your lawyer to help sort out the mess.
| sktrdie wrote:
| 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.
| vmception wrote:
| Typically when I see that said, its impossible to tell if
| someone genuinely has no idea or if they have a comprehensive
| view but move the goal post of "use case" for arbitrary reasons
|
| Do you want to be inspired and be part of that ecosystem, or do
| you want to drone on about how you could do any example use
| case some other irrelevant way that nobody can interact with
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| * decentralized DNS (ENS) which supports IPFS
|
| * privacy technology (tornado cash, AZTEC)
|
| * DeFi (MakerDAO, Uniswap, Compound, Augur, etc)
| donkey-hotei wrote:
| I agree it's hard, outside of finance, to find interesting use
| cases. One use case that I personally enjoy was the use of
| smart contracts to enable the building of decentralized
| ISPs[0].
|
| [0]: https://althea.net/
| jonmaim wrote:
| There is decentralised finance (defi). One example of
| application is lending your money (in stablecoin or token
| format) in a lending protocol of your choice. You can expect a
| very good yield compared to traditional finance. Aave and
| Compound are the most famous. This is one type of the many
| financial applications developed on Ethereum's smart contracts.
| Tepix wrote:
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| Maybe next they can expand into Initial Narco Offerings,
| Initial Human Trafficking Offerings, and eventually Initial
| Genocide Offerings.
| SDLerner wrote:
| Bitcoiners are already using RSK for DeFi. It's compatible with
| Ethereum but uses BTC as native currency. There are several DeFi
| applications already very popular, such as Money on Chain,
| Soveryn and rskswap. More than 600 BTCs are locked in DeFi.
| burakkeceli wrote:
| I'm building Uniswap on Bitcoin Cash. Feel free to check out:
| https://devpost.com/software/swapcash
|
| Same can also be potentially done on Bitcoin (BTC) with BIP-
| Tapscript.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| 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.
| TekMol wrote:
| The problem with Ethereum is that if the guys in power do not
| like what is going on in their blockchain, they fork and
| rewrite history.
| malux85 wrote:
| 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
| gruez wrote:
| >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?
| doggosphere wrote:
| If you want to move fast and break things, choose ETH.
|
| If you want to move slow and never break things, choose
| ETC.
| StavrosK wrote:
| 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.
| gruez wrote:
| >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?
| StavrosK wrote:
| I'm not the right person to ask, as I don't believe that
| there's a way to somehow make software bug-free enough to
| deal with huge amounts of money for an indefinite amount
| of time. However, it seems that enough people think that
| "do the right thing automatically unless someone steals
| millions, in which case revert it" is a good compromise.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Maybe under very exceptional circumstances, i.e. a
| systemic network risk. Since the DAO fiasco we've had a
| number of high profile incidents and the community has
| rejected stepping in (look at the failure of EIP 999).
| I'm not sure if there's presently anything on Ethereum,
| that should it fail, would be as bad as the DAO failure.
| Maybe MakerDAO?
| gruez wrote:
| >Maybe under very exceptional circumstances, i.e. a
| systemic network risk.
|
| that sounds awfully like the justification for bank
| bailouts.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| If they didn't go forward with the DAO fork, I'm not sure
| Ethereum would even exist today.
| [deleted]
| DennisP wrote:
| It happened when Ethereum was less than a year old. The
| hack exploited a vulnerability that was arguably
| systemic, since it also existed in a lot of the sample
| code on ethereum.org.
|
| When Bitcoin was a little more than a year old, it
| reverted five hours of transactions after a bug exploit.
|
| Both blockchains have matured since then and don't do
| that anymore. An Ethereum cofounder's company lost over
| $100M in ETH, and the community refused its requests to
| restore funds with a fork.
| TekMol wrote:
| I think there is no point in "giving it a rest".
|
| If there is a decision to be made between two specific
| blockchains, it is important to point out that one of them
| is not trustworthy.
| brighton36 wrote:
| All blockchains are secured by trust in the developers.
| Proof of work is merely a way to buy their token from a
| power company. All of the problems with have with online
| contention, will manifest in blockchain for this reason.
| lacker wrote:
| One of the best features of cryptocurrency is that other
| people cannot simply vote to take your money away.
| robcohen wrote:
| 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.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| You have pretty selective memory:
| https://coincodex.com/article/3669/the-184-billion-btc-
| bug-t...
|
| Fundamentally blockchains are about consensus, they have a
| mechanism to obtain consensus programatically but this
| programatic consensus can always be overriden if the
| participants decided to run a different version of the
| software. To be noted that the guys "in power" are the
| miners, the developers can only put forward a new version of
| the rules but the miners decide what they want to run.
| mason55 wrote:
| > _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.
| wmf wrote:
| 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.
| opreturn wrote:
| > 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
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Right now the average transaction on the bitcoin chain is
| almost $15. That's double the cost of the hard drive space to
| store the entire blockchain (if you really want to).
|
| No sane person would build on top of bitcoin or use anything
| built on top of bitcoin. It was taken over then redesigned to
| be a disaster and now it is.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| You are exactly right. The Bitcoin Core GitHub repo was
| hijacked years ago by Greg Maxwell's and Adam Back's
| Blockstream.
|
| Until more people understand the history of Bitcoin Core
| (BTC) they will continue to be confused about the high fees
| and slow confirmation times.
|
| [1] https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-
| revisite...
|
| edit: looks like you are getting downvoted too for telling
| the truth about Bitcoin Core.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| The Bitcoin Core (BTC) market is pushed forward only by fraud
| (Tether) and lies (censorship of BitcoinTalk and r/Bitcoin).
|
| The Bitcoin Core project was hijacked and socially engineered
| away from the lead developers many years ago by Adam Back's
| Blockstream. Today it is a Ponzi scheme designed to push
| people onto their "second layer" solutions to "solve" the
| problems they themselves introduced.
| spicybright wrote:
| Any hard evidence you can point to?
| kylebenzle wrote:
| Evidence that Tether is a fraud [1] and that BitcoinTalk
| and r/Bitcoin censor[2]? Yes, there is endless evidence
| of both. Funny that the truth about Bitcoin get downvoted
| so hard here, I thought HN liked to be objective about
| Crypto.
|
| [1] https://newrepublic.com/article/160905/tether-
| cryptocurrency...
|
| [2] https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-
| revisite...
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| This isn't actually controversial for anyone who got
| interested in bitcoin before Gavin Andreesan was kicked
| out and /r/bitcoin was taken over and heavily
| propagandized.
|
| https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-
| histor...
| sagivo wrote:
| Why not using this VC money to support Ethereum? They already do
| that and much more.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| Muneeb answered this here: https://forum.stacks.org/t/what-is-
| the-difference-between-bl...
| sagivo wrote:
| > 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.
| piercebot wrote:
| 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
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| I knew the international cabal of functional programmers was up
| to something
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| This is written in Rust, see https://github.com/blockstack
| x3sphere wrote:
| 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 same way at all - but
| assuming they write some data to the BTC chain to ensure
| validity, etc.
|
| You can read some of the drama here -
| https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/80ycim/a_few_months_af...
|
| I'm mainly curious if the BTC core devs still are apprehensive
| towards these Layer 2 projects. It is one of the reasons why I
| thought smart contracts on BTC were a dead end, and why I
| ultimately sold a bunch of BTC for ETH years ago.
| uncletammy wrote:
| 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 perfectly
| functional blockchain by reneging on the agreement they made to
| increase the block size.
|
| They traded their ideals to get rich and all that momentum was
| lost. Instead of peer to peer cash, we're all left with a
| thousand useless ponzi schemes and a handful of promising coins
| that can't work together to actually achieve Satoshi's goal.
| muneeb wrote:
| 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 a single
| hash on Bitcoin (technically on the order of active miners on
| Bitcoin), so Stacks transactions automatically settle on
| Bitcoin every block.
| dylkil wrote:
| 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?
| opreturn wrote:
| 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
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| How is consensus secured for the Stacks blockchain? Is it proof-
| of-work? How many nodes are there?
|
| What is the root of trust of Stacks? Does it have auto-update? If
| I take over your domain, can I take all Stacks?
|
| How can I independently verify how many mainnet coins have been
| locked as Stacks? How do I run a testnet node?
| tphyahoo2 wrote:
| what problem does smart contracts solve? hint: none.
|
| F.
|
| https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/a16z-struggl...
| DennisP wrote:
| Moving 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 wrote:
| 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 on the Stacks chain. Such wrapped assets exist on other
| chains like Ethereum as well with one main difference that xBTC
| is secured by Bitcoin itself.
|
| b) There are more decentralized solutions similar to Keep
| network, where threshold signatures can be used to move the
| assets by a group of nodes.
|
| c) The most decentralized way of doing this is by locking your
| BTC directly on BTC chain, using Clarity to monitor funds, and
| then having Clarity trigger release of funds on Bitcoin chain.
| This requires Clarity logic to trigger Bitcoin state changes.
| This is theoretically possible but at R&D stage currently.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| Bitcoin to Stacks is supposed to be the easy part...
|
| The question was about how you move Stacks to Bitcoin.
|
| I take from this handwaving answer that it isn't actually
| possible.
|
| Or let's rephrase the question in Bitcoin terms: While the
| BTC are locked up on the Bitcoin blockchain, which key is
| necessary to unlock them? Surely one controlled by
| Blockstack, no?
| lacker wrote:
| There sure is a lot of different stuff named "xBTC"....
| lifty wrote:
| You have to trust the Stacks blockchain to be able to send the
| money back to Bitcoin.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Who here things blockchain as a planet wide computing system will
| take over the world ?
|
| I had a feeling that this would be the actual shift in use of
| computing. Unlike the e-commerce, cloud .. which are structurally
| similar to the previous world.
|
| I'm not preaching for blockchains, it was just a feeling that it
| could be an actual paradigm shift.
| [deleted]
| Tepix wrote:
| Contrary to the headline this appear to be a separate blockchain
| that is merely linked to the Bitcoin blockchain. See
| https://www.stacks.co/technology
| muneeb wrote:
| The Clarity smart contracts have direct visibility into Bitcoin
| state and developers can write logic around it. I do not think
| the headline implies you are changing Bitcoin to do this (don't
| think at this point anyone can change Bitcoin in any
| significant way).
| jstgord wrote:
| no
| jstgord wrote:
| 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.
| a11yguy wrote:
| Its crazy how the conversation changes, it felt like many of the
| people on Hacker News were anti-bitcoin, but now that the price
| is nice, I'm seeing it on the first page all the time.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Many people (many of the same people, even) on HN are still
| anti-bitcoin, and conversely its been on the first page quite a
| bit when the price was less nice than it is now.
|
| This is because HN is diverse, and it can have large factions
| boosting something while other large factions are negative on
| it.
| seibelj wrote:
| 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".
| muneeb wrote:
| 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.
| vmception wrote:
| I've moved off the ideological train and hopped on the "can the
| market bear it" train.
|
| The market can bear committing states to the bitcoin
| blockchain, and there hasn't been a standardized way to do
| that. I would therefore call it smart contracts on bitcoin.
| cal5k wrote:
| Layer 2 seems to be the logical way forward - network fees have
| gotten ridiculous on the Bitcoin blockchain, and reducing the
| frequency with which you need to settle there would be a big
| win. On top of all the added functionality of smart contracts,
| of course.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| Please, don't forget, Bitcoin Core (BTC) was hijacked years
| ago by corporate interests and purposefully crippled with
| high fees.
|
| From day one Bitcoin was designed to have low or no fees, it
| is only because Blockstream was able to wrestle control of
| the GitHub repo and stop the block size increase arbitrarily
| that high fees exists.
|
| Bitcoin Cash (BCH) long ago took over the "Bitcoin" project
| as designed by Satoshi Nakamoto and described in his White
| Paper. Bitcoin Core (BTC) is a broken system designed to
| enrich developers of "Second Layer" solutions like this.
|
| BTC has failed completely as Peer-to-Peer Digital Cash and
| today is push only by charlatans and scammers.
| greggturkington wrote:
| Please, don't forget, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was hijacked years
| ago by Ver who purposefully used misleading marketing.
|
| Bitcoin SV (BSV) long ago took over the "Bitcoin" project
| as designed by Satoshi Nakamoto and described in his White
| Paper.
| gruez wrote:
| >From day one Bitcoin was designed to have low or no fees
|
| How are miners supposed to be compensated, given that the
| block reward halves every few years?
|
| >because Blockstream was able to wrestle control of the
| GitHub repo
|
| Can you rebut these counter-claims made by one of the Core
| devs? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25566420
|
| >is a broken system designed to enrich developers of
| "Second Layer" solutions like this.
|
| How are those developers being enriched? Lightning is free
| and open source.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| > How are miners supposed to be compensated, given that
| the block reward halves every few years?
|
| A solved problem by Satoshi. The block reward covers
| miners expenses for the next 100 years or so, THEN, once
| the block size is large enough and transactions are in
| the millions, a fee of a few cents per transaction
| replaces the block reward.
|
| > Can you rebut these counter-claims made by one of the
| Core devs?
|
| Yes, easily. This article [1] shows what I am saying,
| Core devs are funded by Blockstream. [2] Greg Maxwell
| (nullc) is, "a very dangerous individual whose [actions]
| speak for themselves". Just read about his past, he is a
| master social engineer and manipulator.
|
| [1] https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/60250/bitcoin-
| developm...
|
| [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/74se80/wikipedi
| a_admin...
|
| > How are those developers being enriched? Lightning is
| free and open source.
|
| Lightning does not work. It is a centralized "solution"
| to a decentralized problem. Sure, anyone can make a
| central database, hold Bitcoin and trade them, that is
| just an exchange, that is what Lightning is. What
| Blockstream is selling is not Lightning, their product is
| called Liquid.
| mr_woozy wrote:
| >he is a master social engineer and manipulator.
|
| Lol, I think we all just learned everything we need to
| know about your POV.
| gruez wrote:
| >Yes, easily. This article [1] shows what I am saying,
| Core devs are funded by Blockstream.
|
| You clearly didn't read the linked comment because the
| article doesn't have anything to do with the arguments
| presented.
|
| >Lightning does not work. It is a centralized "solution"
| to a decentralized problem. Sure, anyone can make a
| central database, hold Bitcoin and trade them, that is
| just an exchange, that is what Lightning is.
|
| How is lightning centralized? You can transact with
| anyone you want, and you maintain a "tab" with them,
| which can ultimately be settled up on the blockchain. You
| can also route payments to anyone else on the network.
|
| >What Blockstream is selling is not Lightning, their
| product is called Liquid.
|
| Okay, how are they monetizing it?
| tromp wrote:
| > The block reward covers miners expenses for the next
| 100 years or so
|
| No, it does not. It becomes insignificant in just a few
| decades (getting 32x smaller every 20 years). So a
| constant backlog of high fee paying transaction is
| important to long term security [1].
|
| [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5306354.0
| gruez wrote:
| Yeah, in about 70 years, the block subsidy for the entire
| year will only be 0.01373184 BTC. I highly doubt that
| would be enough to guard almost 21 million BTC from
| double spend attacks. That's the equivalent of spending
| $70,000/year to guard all the gold that's ever been
| mined.
| tphyahoo2 wrote:
| lol.
|
| https://taaalk.co/t/bitcoin-maxima-other-crypto-things
|
| Transactions need to be expensive, like the guy you were
| replying to said. It is beyond obvious.
| chejazi wrote:
| Curious to understand how the peg integrates with Bitcoin's
| UTXO model. For instance, Matic [1] uses a construction of the
| Plasma framework [2] so that the peg can operate
| bidirectionally.
|
| [1] https://docs.matic.network/docs/contribute/matic-
| architectur...
|
| [2] http://plasma.io/
| itiman wrote:
| How much does it cost to interact with it? On an Ethereum smart
| contract if I wanna purchase a NFT that costs $5 the transaction
| cost can be between $1 or $100.
| jzer0cool wrote:
| Just a look through the docs this all reads much better than
| ethereum. For give me as I am still new to the rapid new things
| happening in this space.
|
| What's is the ballpark transaction cost?
|
| Also, I was curious what made it difficult to have smart
| contracts in bitcoin in the first place? I wasn't quite sure why
| others were not simply having done smart contracts like ethereum
| and hope to be better educated the solution here. thanks!
| muneeb wrote:
| Good question!
|
| Bitcoin has limited scripting language (Bitcoin script) for
| security reasons. Having a general smart contract language
| could open up a larger attack surface area for Bitcoin.
|
| The transaction costs will be low initially as they're a
| function of network traffic. The main thing here is to decouple
| scaling of transaction (as miroblocks on Stacks chain) from the
| scalability of Bitcoin (and Bitcoin is hard/impossible to
| change).
| bjoernw wrote:
| 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.
| muneeb wrote:
| 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!
| bjoernw wrote:
| Maybe that's because 99% is purely held to speculate on the
| price going up?
| vmception wrote:
| In the following order of nuance, the 99% of Bitcoiners:
|
| Don't know about this
|
| Don't like the idea of any other distributed ledger
| attracting capital away from Bitcoin purchases
|
| Don't know the Ethereum platform is different than any
| other "altcoin"
|
| Don't like Ethereum based on valid or fictional criticism
|
| Don't like WBTC
|
| Don't like renBTC in its current state
|
| Know about all of this, don't mind it, are not interested
| in complex transactions, are not interested in turning
| their bitcoin into an interest bearing asset
|
| The growth to the 1% has been pretty good and fast!
| Billions of $ of BTC on this stuff over just the last two
| quarters. Isn't that how every startup pitch starts? "If we
| just get 1% of this market ...."
| ChrisClark wrote:
| Especially since everything else is on Ethereum anyway. Since
| this is just a layer 2 solution, you might as well treat
| Ethereum as a layer 2 for Bitcoin.
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