Original author:Jaleel，BlockBeats
Last night, the leader of the ZeroSync project released a white paper titled BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin which caused heated discussion.
As can be seen in this white paper reviewed by Super Testnet and Sam Parker, BitVM is a new computing paradigm designed by Robin Linus at Zero Sync, integrating Optimistic Roll Up, Fraud Proof, Taproot Leaf and Bitcoin Script.
BitVM allows the expression of Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts without changing the consensus rules of the Bitcoin network, and can execute any computable function for offline calculations without leaving any traces on the chain. The white paper also introduces BitVMs architecture, input and output, limitations, and prospects.
The white paper reached 110,000 views in just one hour after it was released. As of the time of writing, the number of views has reached 1.82 million. Discussions in the English community are extremely heated, and it has become one of the biggest hot spots in the encryption circle in recent times. KOL @LeonidasNFT thought this was an exciting innovation, so he engraved BitVM’s paper onBitcoin inscription on, let it exist forever in a more Native way.
What do Bitcoin developers think?
The Bitcoin ecosystem is particularly lively this year. The Ordinals market has spawned many Bitcoin expansion narratives, and Bitcoin developers are also very lively.
Currently focused on the Ordinals marketplace and launchpad, BioniqMarket CEO @BobBodily has been building tools to help developers build on Bitcoin. He said on his social media: BitVM is not a once and for all solution. BitVM is not as good as EVM, it is slower, more expensive and complex. The core advantage of BitVM is that we can get additional security on Bitcoin now. Programmable without upgrades. No new op_codes required. No soft forks required. Works now.
At the same time, BobBodily also said: Potential use cases that are easy to implement with BitVM include decentralizing parts of various applications that currently rely on centralized services, including DLC oracles, congestion control/coinjoin aggregators, and sidechain quorum. In addition, BitVM Does not solve the trustless bridging problem of sidechains, which may require contracts. BitVM is strictly superior to Greg Maxwells 2016 ZKP conditional payments example. BitVM is very complex and difficult to understand and implement. The same thing can be achieved by upgrading Bitcoin with an op_code .”
Bitcoin doesn’t need to change anything
Related researcher Sam Parker sees the potential BitVM offers to enable more programming capabilities without modifying the Bitcoin protocol, and how this capability can help decentralize and eliminate the need for trusted third parties. At the same time, he also mentioned that this is an optional feature, and the Bitcoin community and users can choose whether and how to use this feature.
In a long tweet, Sam Parker wrote: Again, Bitcoin is now Turing complete like any other chain, and this does not require any changes to Bitcoin. Currently, some Bitcoin maximalists are Some of the classic views in Guiding the Country are: Turing complete = bad. I think this seems stupid. First, since the technical definition of Turing completeness actually requires an infinite running time, nothing will ever truly be Turing complete in our reality because we dont have infinite space and time to accommodate this.
Regarding the content of the BitVM white paper, Sam Parker said: In the process, a small group of script hackers, such as @robin_linus and @super_testnet, have figured out how to program all the functionality we want from a general-purpose computer into Bitcoin. A limited set of ways to manipulate the code, so the only thing that prevents Bitcoins virtual machine (VM) from being Turing complete like Ethereum is not a matter of expressive power, but simply a matter of runtime, the most severe limitation of which is the stack size limit.
All BitVM does is allow us to spread the runtime of some logic, beyond the scope of a single transaction, across multiple transactions. thats all. We didnt add any new semantic features, we just exponentially increased the length of the programs we could run. So by technical definition, Bitcoin is not actually more Turing-complete than it was before, it is only endowed with programs that we can reasonably say are sufficiently Turing-complete for any program we actually want to execute. a running time.
This is voluntary, if you dont trust your coins to be locked into a Turing-complete contract (which is perfectly reasonable), then dont lock them into a Turing-complete smart contract. One advantage of the UTXO system is security sandboxing. If people do feel strongly that Bitcoin shouldnt have this feature, maybe due to incentives or something, then that should be an issue worth discussing, but basically it would require getting rid of Taproot, which seems pretty stupid at this time . ” Sam Parker wrote.
BitVM makes me cautiously excited
As a great supporter of Drivechains, another Bitcoin extension protocol, Eric Wall, founder of Simp DAO and senior crypto researcher, was invited by community members to express his views on BitVM. Eric Wall said: I just finished reading this white paper, and all the The concepts are all right for me. Im naturally not interested in solutions that require a very large number of pre-signed transaction exchanges during the setup phase - I dont know what problems such a solution might create. Overhead ) and permission (permission) are two big issues.
For now, he remains cautiously excited about BitVM, waiting to see what actual experiments will bring. Maybe there is an elegant, trivial solution to the two-sided limit of this scheme, maybe not. Perhaps for certain types of computations, such as zk proofs, the overhead is manageable. It would be interesting if BitVM worked well in it to verify zk proofs - BitVM would act as the zkwasm layer he discussed earlier.
As a side note, Im curious about what will happen when people realize that the attack model is quite similar to Drivechains. Miners can steal the entire balance of BitVM by colluding with the prover and censoring the challenge, which is the case Probably lasts less time than in the drive chain, wrote Eric Wall.
By allowing Turing-complete contracts to be expressed on the Bitcoin network without leaving an on-chain trace, BitVM provides a completely new way to explore complex blockchain computations while maintaining the principles and security of the Bitcoin network. This also allows Bitcoin to embrace a wider range of use cases and innovative possibilities without directly modifying its core protocol.
It cannot be ignored that BitVM has triggered many in-depth discussions about the design and evolution of Bitcoin. How it will be implemented and function in the Bitcoin network in the future will be an extremely fascinating technological exploration journey. This also raises a critical question: Are we ready to expand Bitcoin from a digital currency mainly used to store value and transactions to a global platform that can perform broader and more complex calculations? This also drives us to think more deeply about the future form we want for Bitcoin. Should Bitcoin add more native programmability or should it continue to remain simple, secure, and immutable?
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