Robert Linus, project leader at bitcoin development group ZeroSync, has proposed a new system that allows developers to “compute anything in bitcoin,” giving it more similar functionality to its neighboring crypto network ethereum.
Unlike other proposals to expand bitcoin‘s capabilities, “BitVM” does not require any changes to bitcoin‘s code that could cause a contentious rift between the network and the community.
What is BitVM?
According to the project White paper Published on Monday, BitVM is a “computing paradigm for expressing Turing-complete bitcoin contracts.”
Instead of running complex calculations on the blockchain itself, the system suggests that they simply be “verified” into bitcoin, with the calculation performed off-chain. Linus compared the system to optimistic rollups: an ethereum scaling solution that processes many transactions off-chain before publishing them in batches to the main chain.
“This allows for more expressive bitcoin contracts.” explained Linus via Twitter. “In particular, it enables functionality that we thought we would need a soft fork for.”
Linus said this could make games like “Chess, Go or Poker” possible on bitcoin. He also suggested that he could enable “trustless sidechains” for bitcoin, meaning btc could reliably connect to other networks without the need for centralization, although this possibility remains uncertain.
The bitcoin community has hotly debated the implementation of the “Drivechains” upgrade this year, which would create a system for trustless bridging and blind merge mining in bitcoin. In theory, this could make btc transactions more private, programmable, and efficient.
However, the risks of implementing and coordinating the update, which would change bitcoin‘s consensus rules, made many skeptical of the proposal. According to the author of Drivechains Pablo SztorcDrivechains could be possible through BitVM, although they will be “very inefficient” compared to their own proposal.
BitVM Limits
Like most proposals, Linus said BitVM still has limitations. “The main drawback… is that it is limited to the two-party environment with a tester and a verifier,” he noted, adding that it also requires “significant amounts of computation and off-chain communication… to run programs.”
Despite generating over 2.4 million impressions on Twitter, many developers were quick to call the project overrated.
“This is getting too much attention in the bitcoin world.” saying Paradigm researcher Dan Robinson on Monday. “The protocol only works for two parties, so it cannot be used in rollups or other multi-party applications.”
Blockstream CEO and bitcoin OG Adam Back Too He suggested that a different version of Linus’s proposal has existed since 2016, in the form of Greg Maxwell’s Zero-Knowledge Contingent Payment (ZKCP) system.
Linus, however, maintains that there are key differences. “You couldn’t play chess in just one ZKCP,” he said.
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