On July 7th, Vitalik Buterin, along with Bitcoin supporters Eric Wall and Udi Wertheimer, had a detailed discussion in a Twitter Space about what Bitcoin developers can learn from Ethereum developers.

Eric Wall and Udi Wertheimer are both important figures in the Ordinals project, Taproot Wizards, and publicly support Ordinals, often advocating for building enhanced functionalities on the Bitcoin network.

Buterin mentioned that he had studied the Pie Bitcoin tool and tried to create a Python library to do Bitcoin-related tasks.

Buterin stated that Ordinals revived the "builder culture" of Bitcoin and highly praised the Ordinals and BRC 20 standards, considering it a push for the "stagnant" Bitcoin ecosystem. "Ordinals brings Bitcoin ecosystem back to a culture of actual action, and that's a good thing."

Furthermore, the three individuals discussed the scalability issues in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Wall believes that the Lightning Network cannot accommodate future users and often fails when processing "medium-sized payments." In response, Buterin suggested that the best approach is to focus on implementing different types of Layer-2 solutions while looking for ways to make the Bitcoin base layer more efficient.

However, Wertheimer believes that focusing on rollups and introducing Layer-2 is fine, but once rollups are adopted, the Bitcoin network can deploy smart contracts.

Nevertheless, the viewpoints of Wall and Wertheimer faced criticism from orthodox Bitcoin supporters. They argue that using NFTs and smart contracts on Bitcoin would weaken its primary function as a peer-to-peer cash network. These critics include Jan 3 CEO Samson Mow, who believes that Ordinals wastes block space that could have been used for Bitcoin payments.

However, Wall responded to this by stating that Bitcoin can serve as aThe "proof system" of zero-knowledge proofs does not congest the network. We (Bitcoin supporters) always want to do things related to DeFi, but we just hope that the Bitcoin underlying layer can act as a referee or arbitrator for computations without having to run computations on-chain. Wall also believes that we should not only consider Layers as a means of payment, but I think we can also consider them capable of doing more. This discussion has sparked new controversy in the Bitcoin community. Blockstream CEO Adam Beck, for example, opposes this idea, saying, "We have already told them what to avoid in terms of security/complexity. Bitcoin did smart things in 2014 to avoid problems, and they disregarded us and did the opposite, so I'm not sure how much there is to learn."