I came across [this article]( discussing how a smart contract side-chain is enabling easier asset transfers to the Bitcoin network, to help provide more of an Ethereum-style smart contracts functionality to BTC. One issue I always saw with Bitcoin was it’s lack of smart contract capabilities, and of course its TPS. But seeing this news makes it a little more interesting moving forward. What are your thoughts on the Bitcoin utility when compared to other networks? What do you think its future looks like?
What do you think of the future utility of Bitcoin with more projects adding smart contract capabilities to the network?
Rootstock has been around for years, it’s a sidechain, i.e. not Bitcoin. Bitcoin has always had smart contracts, what you mean is “Turing complete” smart contracts which can execute arbitrary data on loops.
I believe the BTC community will strangle it in its crib because they view innovation as a threat to monetary policy.
Stuff like this could enable DeFi apps on BTC but there’s no way an upgrade like that can navigate the political landsape of BTC and actually get implemented: https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements/blob/master/doc/tapscript_opcodes.md
Even if individual TXes are not Turing-complete, chains of TXes would be: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Self-Reproducing-Coins-as-Universal-Turing-Machine-Chepurnoy-Kharin/05c6514c671d380cb2aa02ffa504bb4faca7b92c
Meanwhile, on Bitcoin Cash chain, we like good tech, and we actually activated [TX introspection opcodes](https://gitlab.com/GeneralProtocols/research/chips/-/blob/master/CHIP-2021-02-Add-Native-Introspection-Opcodes.md) in May’22 and [native tokens](https://github.com/bitjson/cashtokens) that can interact and be controlled by contracts are coming in May’23. In November, our first DeFi product – non-custodian derivatives trading, settled by oracle – entered public beta, and currently the TVL is about 5000 BCH and cumulative volume 45000 BCH. The CashTokens upgrade will make Drivechain-like L2 sidechains possible, too. So, if you’re looking for a Bitcoin-tech chain that’s trying to work out DeFi UTXO solutions, it is Bitcoin Cash and it can scale 1000x better than EVM, but contract design is harder because the state is sharded by default and contracts are naturally multi-threaded.
I think Bitcoin should be used as a store of value. The NFT stuff already think it’s unnecessary, but smart contracts would turn into change it’s use completely. There are way better options for that already
I see most countries following the footsteps of El Salvador and making it a legal tender. Mind you, it is already being accepted in Lugano as a form of settlement for goods, services and taxes.
If more projects can add smart contract capabilities to Bitcoin, that means it can do more stuff, right?
If it is real-world utility then we need to focus on acceptance, thanks to payment apps that are adding cryptocurrency as means of payment. CryptMi also supports payments in different cryptocurrencies.
This is why I believe Bitcoin will continue to be relevant in the future. The ability to execute more complex transactions will be a game-changer. Enabling more use cases with the network, more security, more versatility