20 ms·

Smart contracts on Bitcoin

214 points by rmason 6y ago

seibelj 6y ago
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".
- vmception 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
      >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 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 6y ago
        > 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-development-funding-is-led-by-blockstream-and-lightning-labs-says-bitmex https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/60250/bitcoin-developm... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/74se80/wikipedia_admins_gregory_maxwell_of_blockstream/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/74se80/wikipedia_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.
- chejazi 6y ago
  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-architecture https://docs.matic.network/docs/contribute/matic-architectur... [2] http://plasma.io/ http://plasma.io/
- muneeb 6y ago
  The smart contracts part comes with Clarity lang: https://clarity-lang.org/ https://clarity-lang.org/ Clarity contracts have direct visibility into Bitcoin state and can write logic against that.
  - everfree 6y ago
    How useful is it to have a read-only glass window into Bitcoin that your smart contracts can look through? The only practical application I can think of is atomic swaps, which can be accomplished any number of other, easier ways.
    - jude- 6y ago
      It means that Clarity smart contracts always have all the data they need to validate Bitcoin transactions. Unlike wBTC and friends, there's no need to copy header hashes from Bitcoin into the Stacks chain. By extension, this means there's no need to worry about catastrophic corner cases, such as the copied data being missing or invalid, the copied data not being mined in the canonical fork, or the copied data corresponding to a minority Bitcoin fork.
      - everfree 6y ago
        Interesting. If you don't mind, what's an example of a practical application where it would be useful to validate a bitcoin transaction without the ability for a smart contract to custody it? Just asking because, again, the value proposition in practical terms is a little unclear to me.
        jude- 6y ago
        Well, the intended use-case is to make it so the act of transferring BTC to a particular address will cause xBTC tokens to be minted in a Clarity contract by the principal that sent the transaction. From there, you can move the xBTC tokens around in Stacks. This would be paired with a STX-collateralized service that would ultimately let you trade your xBTC back for BTC. The service would put STX up as collateral, which would be depleted if the service quality degrades. The Clarity contract for the collateral would track the service's xBTC to BTC transfers, and would allow the service to post the BTC transactions it sends as proof of good service quality (thereby staving off depletion). Other ideas come to mind: * Proof of (attempted) mining a STX block. A Blockstack app could use a Clarity contract to determine if a user was also a miner, and offer them in-app perks for helping to secure the network. * Backwards-compatibility with BNS 1.0. Stacks 1.0 implemented a naming service (BNS) on Bitcoin, and Clarity's access to Bitcoin state can be leveraged to allow users to prove that they are OGs -- i.e. that they registered a BNS name before Stacks 2.0 went live (or did something specific with it, like updated it to have a particular owner or have a particular content hash). * Proof of payment to a particular address. Many organizations, including open-source projects, take BTC for donations. A Clarity contract could be written to identify Stacks users who donated to a particular organization earlier. * Proof of payment channel. You could demonstrate to a Clarity contract that you have opened a payment channel with a particular amount to a particular address, and post collateral that will be slashed if your payment channel closed before a particular Bitcoin block height.
Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
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.
- mason55 6y ago
  > 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.
  - kylebenzle 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      Any hard evidence you can point to?
      - kylebenzle 6y ago
        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-scam-enrich-bitcoin-investors https://newrepublic.com/article/160905/tether-cryptocurrency... [2] https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisited-58d5b1bdcd64 https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisite...
      - 6y ago
DennisP 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
  - lacker 6y ago
    There sure is a lot of different stuff named "xBTC"....
  - iso8859-1 6y ago
    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?
    - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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x3sphere 6y ago
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_after_the_counterparty_developers/ 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.
- muneeb 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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-transfer-mining-with-bitcoin/ https://blog.blockstack.org/realizing-web-3-proof-of-transfe... Edit: typo
jstgord 6y ago
no
- jstgord 6y ago
  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.
bjoernw 6y ago
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.
- ChrisClark 6y ago
  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.
- muneeb 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Maybe that's because 99% is purely held to speculate on the price going up?
    - vmception 6y ago
      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 ....”
      - hanniabu 6y ago
        As someone with only a cursory knowledge of wbtc and renbtc, what are the issues that people see with it?
jxi 6y ago
They only support Chinese exchanges (and probably requires KYC). This thing is not gonna take off.
sktrdie 6y ago
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.
- donkey-hotei 6y ago
  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/ https://althea.net/
- jonmaim 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  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/ https://www.coinspeaker.com/first-ilo-launches-avalanche/ I think we'll see many more of these in the future.
  - wmf 6y ago
    Maybe next they can expand into Initial Narco Offerings, Initial Human Trafficking Offerings, and eventually Initial Genocide Offerings.
- vmception 6y ago
  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
burakkeceli 6y ago
I'm building Uniswap on Bitcoin Cash. Feel free to check out: https://devpost.com/software/swapcash https://devpost.com/software/swapcash Same can also be potentially done on Bitcoin (BTC) with BIP-Tapscript.
sagivo 6y ago
Why not using this VC money to support Ethereum? They already do that and much more.
- iso8859-1 6y ago
  Muneeb answered this here: https://forum.stacks.org/t/what-is-the-difference-between-blockstack-and-ethereum/781/3 https://forum.stacks.org/t/what-is-the-difference-between-bl...
  - sagivo 6y ago
    > 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.
    - odinho 6y ago
      Why? That is the thing that excites me the most. Though it isn't thightly locked with the whole STX-side of things which isn't as interesting to me. Only needing some "dumb" storage media to store your application data and "cloud" files unlocks suddenly a user-centric way for everyone to store data. It also unlocks real competition on the infrastructure layer. You don't make your own generator and make your own power, -- you don't buy power from say Dell because it needs "Dell electricity". Data should be like this too, ability to be owned and controlled purely by the user (as in you have solar panels + battery) or what most people would do: delegate the work to a power provider. Ofc not real competition in the "power provider" case since there's physical stuff happening, but for data storage (and batch/"offline" computation and event/webhook handling) a user will be able to set up their own raspberry pi or just use say Amazon to store the encrypted data. :) I find it fits 100% in to the world I'd want to live in. ^_^
tphyahoo2 6y ago
what problem does smart contracts solve? hint: none. F. https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/a16z-struggles-to-earn-passing-grade-in-crypto-fund-ii-learn-by-doing-classroom-project/ https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/a16z-struggl...
a11yguy 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
- 1996 6y ago
  I guess everyone as a price, even on HN :)
itiman 6y ago
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.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  Off-tangent, but Immutable, the makers of Gods Unchained, is coming out with ImmutableX for trading NFTs on Ethereum at fees of less than a cent: https://www.immutable.com/ https://www.immutable.com/ This uses StarkWare's new Turing Complete programming language for generating STARK proofs (which are succinct zero knowledge proofs that have a trustless setup).
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Clarity, at least on paper, sounds way nicer than Solidity. We'll see how it ends.
- everfree 6y ago
  Check out Vyper if you haven't already. It's a newer alternative to Solidity that removes a lot of Solidity's cruft while still targeting the EVM.
dperfect 6y ago
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 6y ago
  For onchain purposes it can just be a matter of convenience, not a panacea or cure all
- ZitchDog 6y ago
  It is much cheaper to execute a smart contract.
- stocknoob 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Wouldn't that just make those few oracles an increasingly valuable target for manipulation/corruption?
    - stocknoob 6y ago
      Do you trust Amazon, Google and Microsoft or millions of sysadmins in podunk companies to secure their infrastructure?
SDLerner 6y ago
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.
piercebot 6y ago
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 https://clarity-lang.org
- everfree 6y ago
  Compared to Solidity, yes. But compared to Vyper, the other big Ethereum language (and also a decidable language), I don't personally see any advantage. I could be wrong, though.
AzzieElbab 6y ago
I knew the international cabal of functional programmers was up to something
- iso8859-1 6y ago
  This is written in Rust, see https://github.com/blockstack https://github.com/blockstack
iso8859-1 6y ago
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?
- jude- 6y ago
  > How is consensus secured for the Stacks blockchain? Is it proof-of-work? This is all described in SIP-001 (https://github.com/stacksgov/sips/blob/main/sips/sip-001/sip-001-burn-election.md https://github.com/stacksgov/sips/blob/main/sips/sip-001/sip...). > How many nodes are there? Here's a sample: http://seed-0.mainnet.stacks.co:20443/v2/neighbors http://seed-0.mainnet.stacks.co:20443/v2/neighbors > What is the root of trust of Stacks? Does it have auto-update? If I take over your domain, can I take all Stacks? Root of trust is the history of cryptographic sortitions in the Bitcoin chain (again, see SIP-001). The chain can soft-fork to upgrade -- a direct and desirable consequence of Clarity being a decidable programming language. If you want to attack the chain, you'll need to mine a longer Stacks chain (or attack Bitcoin). > How can I independently verify how many mainnet coins have been locked as Stacks? How do I run a testnet node? See docs.blockstack.org
Tepix 6y ago
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 https://www.stacks.co/technology
- muneeb 6y ago
  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).
jzer0cool 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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).
agumonkey 6y ago
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.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  I firmly believe this. It is taking the digitization of the world to the last economic layer: governance and law. But I also believe we are very very early, and it will take maybe 30 years to develop to start massively transforming industries.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    > governance and law. from the very few I know, I didn't see governance and law in blockchain projects. What I perceived is a never ending shared network of operations that can basically replace companies.
    - CryptoPunk 6y ago
      The conceptual model is of the governance being in the consensus layer, which operates independently of other political systems, and the law being in the programmatic contracts the blockchain executes. But yes, there are other ways it can be conceived, and yours seems valid.
cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
This is basically a bespoke blockchain that uses BTC as oracle. It's not a smart contracts "on Bitcoin". By this logic, I could write an ERC20 token on ETH and use some BTC state, and call it "smart contracts on Bitcoin".
- muneeb 6y ago
  Muneeb here, Stacks co-founder. So it does not use Bitcoin as oracle. It uses Bitcoin as a settlement layer. (Oracles like Chainlink can be, and are being, built using Clarity lang for Stacks blockchain itself.) For using Bitcoin state on Ethereum, you'll need to implement Bitcoin SPV proofs. It's entirely possible but fairly complicated to do that given (a) Ethereum is a separate network that can fork independently from Bitcoin (Clarity contracts on Stacks fork with Bitcoin), and (b) Eth miners have no native visibility into Bitcoin state (Stacks miners have full visibility into Bitcoin state). Possible but more complicated. Further, any asset generation and transfers etc on such ERC20 asset would have nothing to with Bitcoin vs on Stacks all asset generation and transfers etc settle on Bitcoin and are secured by the Bitcoin main blockchain.
  - cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
    People are asking you why this counts as "on Bitcoin", and you've been saying throughout this thread it's because it has access to the Bitcoin ledger data. My point is that it pretty much sounds like you're using BTC as an "oracle" (and of course, you're using BTC as settlement, but that's a given, and also doesn't qualify as being "on bitcoin"). Stacks is a separate ledger that pegs itself to Bitcoin, not "on". "Smart contracts on Bitcoin" would be something that's entirely built on the Bitcoin ledger and every smart contract transaction is a Bitcoin transaction that settles.
    - muneeb 6y ago
      What you are describing is similar to what Stacks 1.0 was i.e., directly on top of the Bitcoin chain -- a virtualchain. Every Stacks 1.0 transaction was a Bitcoin transaction. The lessons we learned from that deployment for 2+ years is that (a) it doesn't scale that well and (b) it's very hard to modify Bitcoin and get new changes accepted (for good reason), so you end up with very limited scripting. To fix the two limitations of Stacks 1.0, we worked on Stacks 2.0 which has a separate blockchain (so scalability independent of Bitcoin) where settlements still happen on Bitcoin and, more importantly, a full smart contract language without modifying Bitcoin itself: https://clarity-lang.org https://clarity-lang.org
exabrial 6y ago
Please, enough with Bitcoin. It's an environmental disaster.
- staplers 6y ago
  So is the internet and computers and cars.
- px43 6y ago
  It's only economical to mine in areas with significant excess power, mostly around dams, but also wind farms and regions powered by geothermal. If anything, mining subsidizes green energy projects, and drives interest in cheaper and more efficient energy production, as well as more efficient semiconductor technologies.
  - exabrial 6y ago
    I really don't think that's true except in pockets of the usa or europe with free markets (the power part)
    - px43 6y ago
      Not at all. Also very much true in China. Miners are largely concentrated around the Sichuan area, which is also well known for their massive investments in hydroelectric power.
      - exabrial 6y ago
        So essentially it's wasted as heat instead of being used to replace carbon sourced sources
  - terse_malvolio 6y ago
    Subsidize? I think it's the opposite. Mining parasitizes on the cheapness of electric power.
    - 6y ago
josh2600 6y ago
Edit 3: See my nested child comment. My understanding (from a 2010 conversation with a friend who was deep in btc) was that there was a time where bitcoin scripting could cause transactions to appear onchain that would look valid to a novice but would not actually perform the actions described such that a scam could be perpetrated. I have not done the work to validate these claims. I stand by my comments on Eth and Satoshi Dice. The crazy thing is: bitcoin was ethereum. The community killed scripting because it was antithetical to the thing that makes money in BTC: trust. The constant flow of n00bs coming in who got their transactions reversed by OP codes and said "BUT I THOUGHT BITCOIN TRANSACTIONS WERE IRREVERSIBLE!!?!?!!?!?!1111" was eroding trust in the ecosystem. Really, I think the beginning of bitcoin jumping the shark was Satoshi Dice: https://www.coindesk.com/company/satoshidice https://www.coindesk.com/company/satoshidice. Anyways, Bitcoin off-chain scripting won't replace Eth anymore than any other off-chain scripting system will replace Eth. If this kills Eth it will be because people don't want on-chain scripting, not because people want off-chain scripting on bitcoin (ergo, the meta problem is that on-chain scripting doesn't scale in every sense of the word scale; fees, tx speed, finality, etc). Caveat emptor: it's entirely possible this company could work or take off. In crypto, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Edit: Just to be extra clear, the problems with ethereum, to me at least, aren't actually on-chain scaling; that feels solvable. What feels unsolvable to me is two things: 1) turing completeness and 2) compilation malleability (if the compiler/machine can change but the code can't, guess what, old code's behavior becomes less predictable over time... computing systems with longevity gain minimal entropy over time). Edit 2: The only rational way I can make sense of turing completeness and compilation malleability as features is if the ecosystem is engineering ecological behavior in, that is to say: old programs should become less valuable unless they accurately predicted the future. Maybe that's rational?
- eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
  > The community killed scripting because it was antithetical to the thing that makes money in BTC: trust. The constant flow of n00bs coming in who got their transactions reversed by OP codes and said "BUT I THOUGHT BITCOIN TRANSACTIONS WERE IRREVERSIBLE!!?!?!!?!?!1111" was eroding trust in the ecosystem. I never heard of all of this having happened. To my knowledge Bitcoin's scripting language was not trimmed, it was in fact extended over the years by various BIPs [1]. What's your source for these statements? [1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips https://github.com/bitcoin/bips
X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
So it's a sidechain that ocassionally checks in it's state to bitcoin's main chain? And you can lock up BTC on the mainchain to use it on the sidechain?
- everfree 6y ago
  In essence, yes, it's a sidechain. From their site: > Like Bitcoin, Stacks is a layer-1 blockchain. Proof of Transfer connects it to Bitcoin with a 1:1 block ratio.
  - jude- 6y ago
    Not really. The key difference is the degree of involvement Bitcoin miners have in Stacks mining. In side-chains, Bitcoin miners would need to opt-in to mining the side-chain and validate its blocks. In Stacks, Bitcoin miners only need to include the Stacks miners' block-commitment transactions into Bitcoin blocks. Since block-commitment transactions look like normal BTC transactions, no Bitcoin miner involvement is necessary beyond what they're already doing. The full protocol description can be found in https://github.com/stacksgov/sips https://github.com/stacksgov/sips (see SIP-001 and SIP-007 in particular).
- muneeb 6y ago
  The design can be thought of similar to a side chain but it's not really a side chain. It uses a new type of consensus, called Proof of Transfer (PoX). Stacks miners have visibility into both the Bitcoin chain and the Stacks chain. Leader election happens on Bitcoin and winning leader writes blocks on the Stacks chain. Details: https://blockstack.org/pox.pdf https://blockstack.org/pox.pdf
qixxiq 6y ago
Following the links down a hole a little bit I saw this statement: "Bitcoin is by far the largest and most secure blockchain"[1] Sure it's the largest, but it seems ETH2 might now be the most secure. It (at current prices) has $2,400,000,000 staked in the network. Sure this is still in the league of nation states to corrupt, but the penalties for breaking the rules are _so much higher_. Given that, and the fact that Ethereum is based around smart contracts, I find it hard to believe that this could compete with ETH2. [1] https://blog.blockstack.org/realizing-web-3-proof-of-transfer-mining-with-bitcoin/ https://blog.blockstack.org/realizing-web-3-proof-of-transfe...
- cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
  having a lot of money staked doesn't mean it's secure. The security model of Bitcoin comes from proof of work, which most people complain as being waste. But it's not actually waste. It's secure because miners have to keep working hard and "wasting energy" because the network is worth protecting (and only if the network is worth protecting). With proof of stake, the stakers only need to make an investment once in the beginning, so it results in rich get richer, and the network is essentially "protected" by those who do not keep working hard to protect the ledger. This suffers from the same flaw that exists in the real world financial system. The whole system could collapse overnight like a domino if something goes wrong. It's much more unlikely for something like that to happen for Proof of Work because miners invest heavily in constantly innovating and investing back into the network. To summarize, in theory Bitcoin is secure exactly because miners "waste" energy. Without wasting energy, all the protection is just a mirage.
  - jtsiskin 6y ago
    I'm not sure of the argument - so it results in rich get richer In PoW, the same 'rich get richer' applies - miners can buy more mining rigs and thus it compounds the same? miners invest heavily in constantly innovating and investing back into the network In PoS, is this not exactly the same, if not even more true? Stakers are by definition highly invested into the network The whole system could collapse overnight like a domino if something goes wrong Could you elaborate on this, why is this more likely in PoS over PoW? PoW had decreased decentralization substantially to only happen in regions where electricity is the cheapest. PoS at least prevents this problem.
jbirer 6y ago
Putting lipstick on a pig. Ethereum exists for a reason.
keepalive 6y ago
Sell drugs be millionaire, ez
ejanus 6y ago
Is this a side-chain with independent EVM and also mineable? I need a simple and clear explanation of what stack 2.0 is?
predictmktegirl 6y ago
Honestly, I like the idea, although I'd prefer a pure L2 for security rather than a sidechain, which is what this appears to be. Unfortunately, I don't think this is a tech problem. How do you get the devs to move en masse from Ethereum back to BTC? The network effects are just so enormous, it feels like a catastrophic failure needs to happen to Eth at this point. I'll check it out and play around, will never say never. I'm just generally skeptical of sidechains because why can't Eth just be a sidechain to BTC, or various incarnations of the same end like atomic swaps, BTC collateralization, etc?
bouncycastle 6y ago
This is not on Bitcoin, but a seperate network with its own token (STX) that is secured by "Proof of Transfer" - see https://www.stacks.co/ https://www.stacks.co/ Also, it could, in theory, be attached to Ethereum too, and probably more trivial to do. These networks come with their own security guarantees, trade-offs & governance pitfalls, but unfortunately do not mention these on their home page of their shiny professionally designed website. I also don't see a future for these things on Bitcoin, because as soon as bitcoin block rewards diminish, the miners would need to be paid from transaction fees. However, for the miners to be profitable, the transaction fees would need to increase an order of a magnitude - making solutions such as these potentially expensive and infeasible. There were a few projects like this in the past, one from memory was called Counterparty. Not sure what happened to that. I guess the 10 minute block times and high fees might have been the culprit. Conclusion: Anybody promoting this is just trying to sell their bag of STX tokens.
kikowi 6y ago
People tried to gain influence over the Bitcoin network in the past and they never succeded. Its much like the power of the Queen in United Kingdom. Theoretically she could overthrown the government, but in practice that will never happen. Several Bitcoin mining pools tried to attack the network in the past, but the majority of their hashpower vanished and new hashpower appeared to protect the network. The fact that Bitcoin was able to sustain security for 12 years makes it so valuable (especially because the incentive to take over is worth so much (market cap of $0.7T). Ethereum's new PoS might be better in the future, however we are still many years away from properly verifing that. However I don't think it is possible to theoretically design a system that is secure and cheap to sustain at the same time. I believe security comes from expensivness (miners energy waste and slow transactions).
worik 6y ago
Why? Still have not seen a use case for crypto currencies that is honest, legal, and not a waste. A lot of naivety and scamming as far as I can tell. I am completely stumped as to why anybody who has programmed a computer and experienced how hard it is to get them right would think smart contracts are a better idea than plain old legal ones. I am not saying that the current arrangements around private property, money, law, and power are good. I just do not see crypto currencies disrupting them. Nor smart contracts. So, why?

214 points by rmason 6y ago

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".

vmception 6y ago
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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    >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 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 6y ago
      > 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-development-funding-is-led-by-blockstream-and-lightning-labs-says-bitmex https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/60250/bitcoin-developm... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/74se80/wikipedia_admins_gregory_maxwell_of_blockstream/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/74se80/wikipedia_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.
chejazi 6y ago
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-architecture https://docs.matic.network/docs/contribute/matic-architectur... [2] http://plasma.io/ http://plasma.io/
muneeb 6y ago
The smart contracts part comes with Clarity lang: https://clarity-lang.org/ https://clarity-lang.org/ Clarity contracts have direct visibility into Bitcoin state and can write logic against that.
- everfree 6y ago
  How useful is it to have a read-only glass window into Bitcoin that your smart contracts can look through? The only practical application I can think of is atomic swaps, which can be accomplished any number of other, easier ways.
  - jude- 6y ago
    It means that Clarity smart contracts always have all the data they need to validate Bitcoin transactions. Unlike wBTC and friends, there's no need to copy header hashes from Bitcoin into the Stacks chain. By extension, this means there's no need to worry about catastrophic corner cases, such as the copied data being missing or invalid, the copied data not being mined in the canonical fork, or the copied data corresponding to a minority Bitcoin fork.
    - everfree 6y ago
      Interesting. If you don't mind, what's an example of a practical application where it would be useful to validate a bitcoin transaction without the ability for a smart contract to custody it? Just asking because, again, the value proposition in practical terms is a little unclear to me.
      - jude- 6y ago
        Well, the intended use-case is to make it so the act of transferring BTC to a particular address will cause xBTC tokens to be minted in a Clarity contract by the principal that sent the transaction. From there, you can move the xBTC tokens around in Stacks. This would be paired with a STX-collateralized service that would ultimately let you trade your xBTC back for BTC. The service would put STX up as collateral, which would be depleted if the service quality degrades. The Clarity contract for the collateral would track the service's xBTC to BTC transfers, and would allow the service to post the BTC transactions it sends as proof of good service quality (thereby staving off depletion). Other ideas come to mind: * Proof of (attempted) mining a STX block. A Blockstack app could use a Clarity contract to determine if a user was also a miner, and offer them in-app perks for helping to secure the network. * Backwards-compatibility with BNS 1.0. Stacks 1.0 implemented a naming service (BNS) on Bitcoin, and Clarity's access to Bitcoin state can be leveraged to allow users to prove that they are OGs -- i.e. that they registered a BNS name before Stacks 2.0 went live (or did something specific with it, like updated it to have a particular owner or have a particular content hash). * Proof of payment to a particular address. Many organizations, including open-source projects, take BTC for donations. A Clarity contract could be written to identify Stacks users who donated to a particular organization earlier. * Proof of payment channel. You could demonstrate to a Clarity contract that you have opened a payment channel with a particular amount to a particular address, and post collateral that will be slashed if your payment channel closed before a particular Bitcoin block height.

Acrobatic_Road 6y ago

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.

mason55 6y ago
> 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.
- kylebenzle 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Any hard evidence you can point to?
    - kylebenzle 6y ago
      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-scam-enrich-bitcoin-investors https://newrepublic.com/article/160905/tether-cryptocurrency... [2] https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisited-58d5b1bdcd64 https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisite...
    - 6y ago

DennisP 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.
- lacker 6y ago
  There sure is a lot of different stuff named "xBTC"....
- iso8859-1 6y ago
  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?
  - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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x3sphere 6y ago

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_after_the_counterparty_developers/ 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.

muneeb 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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-transfer-mining-with-bitcoin/ https://blog.blockstack.org/realizing-web-3-proof-of-transfe... Edit: typo

jstgord 6y ago

jstgord 6y ago
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.

bjoernw 6y ago

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.

ChrisClark 6y ago
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.
muneeb 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Maybe that's because 99% is purely held to speculate on the price going up?
  - vmception 6y ago
    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 ....”
    - hanniabu 6y ago
      As someone with only a cursory knowledge of wbtc and renbtc, what are the issues that people see with it?

jxi 6y ago

They only support Chinese exchanges (and probably requires KYC). This thing is not gonna take off.

sktrdie 6y ago

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.

donkey-hotei 6y ago
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/ https://althea.net/
jonmaim 6y ago
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 6y ago
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/ https://www.coinspeaker.com/first-ilo-launches-avalanche/ I think we'll see many more of these in the future.
- wmf 6y ago
  Maybe next they can expand into Initial Narco Offerings, Initial Human Trafficking Offerings, and eventually Initial Genocide Offerings.
vmception 6y ago
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

burakkeceli 6y ago

I'm building Uniswap on Bitcoin Cash. Feel free to check out: https://devpost.com/software/swapcash https://devpost.com/software/swapcash Same can also be potentially done on Bitcoin (BTC) with BIP-Tapscript.

sagivo 6y ago

Why not using this VC money to support Ethereum? They already do that and much more.

iso8859-1 6y ago
Muneeb answered this here: https://forum.stacks.org/t/what-is-the-difference-between-blockstack-and-ethereum/781/3 https://forum.stacks.org/t/what-is-the-difference-between-bl...
- sagivo 6y ago
  > 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.
  - odinho 6y ago
    Why? That is the thing that excites me the most. Though it isn't thightly locked with the whole STX-side of things which isn't as interesting to me. Only needing some "dumb" storage media to store your application data and "cloud" files unlocks suddenly a user-centric way for everyone to store data. It also unlocks real competition on the infrastructure layer. You don't make your own generator and make your own power, -- you don't buy power from say Dell because it needs "Dell electricity". Data should be like this too, ability to be owned and controlled purely by the user (as in you have solar panels + battery) or what most people would do: delegate the work to a power provider. Ofc not real competition in the "power provider" case since there's physical stuff happening, but for data storage (and batch/"offline" computation and event/webhook handling) a user will be able to set up their own raspberry pi or just use say Amazon to store the encrypted data. :) I find it fits 100% in to the world I'd want to live in. ^_^

tphyahoo2 6y ago

what problem does smart contracts solve? hint: none. F. https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/a16z-struggles-to-earn-passing-grade-in-crypto-fund-ii-learn-by-doing-classroom-project/ https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/a16z-struggl...

a11yguy 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.
1996 6y ago
I guess everyone as a price, even on HN :)

itiman 6y ago

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.

CryptoPunk 6y ago
Off-tangent, but Immutable, the makers of Gods Unchained, is coming out with ImmutableX for trading NFTs on Ethereum at fees of less than a cent: https://www.immutable.com/ https://www.immutable.com/ This uses StarkWare's new Turing Complete programming language for generating STARK proofs (which are succinct zero knowledge proofs that have a trustless setup).

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

Clarity, at least on paper, sounds way nicer than Solidity. We'll see how it ends.

everfree 6y ago
Check out Vyper if you haven't already. It's a newer alternative to Solidity that removes a lot of Solidity's cruft while still targeting the EVM.

dperfect 6y ago

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 6y ago
For onchain purposes it can just be a matter of convenience, not a panacea or cure all
ZitchDog 6y ago
It is much cheaper to execute a smart contract.
stocknoob 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Wouldn't that just make those few oracles an increasingly valuable target for manipulation/corruption?
  - stocknoob 6y ago
    Do you trust Amazon, Google and Microsoft or millions of sysadmins in podunk companies to secure their infrastructure?

SDLerner 6y ago

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.

piercebot 6y ago

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 https://clarity-lang.org

everfree 6y ago
Compared to Solidity, yes. But compared to Vyper, the other big Ethereum language (and also a decidable language), I don't personally see any advantage. I could be wrong, though.

AzzieElbab 6y ago

I knew the international cabal of functional programmers was up to something

iso8859-1 6y ago
This is written in Rust, see https://github.com/blockstack https://github.com/blockstack

iso8859-1 6y ago

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?

jude- 6y ago
> How is consensus secured for the Stacks blockchain? Is it proof-of-work? This is all described in SIP-001 (https://github.com/stacksgov/sips/blob/main/sips/sip-001/sip-001-burn-election.md https://github.com/stacksgov/sips/blob/main/sips/sip-001/sip...). > How many nodes are there? Here's a sample: http://seed-0.mainnet.stacks.co:20443/v2/neighbors http://seed-0.mainnet.stacks.co:20443/v2/neighbors > What is the root of trust of Stacks? Does it have auto-update? If I take over your domain, can I take all Stacks? Root of trust is the history of cryptographic sortitions in the Bitcoin chain (again, see SIP-001). The chain can soft-fork to upgrade -- a direct and desirable consequence of Clarity being a decidable programming language. If you want to attack the chain, you'll need to mine a longer Stacks chain (or attack Bitcoin). > How can I independently verify how many mainnet coins have been locked as Stacks? How do I run a testnet node? See docs.blockstack.org

Tepix 6y ago

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 https://www.stacks.co/technology

muneeb 6y ago
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).

jzer0cool 6y ago

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 6y ago
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).

agumonkey 6y ago

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.

CryptoPunk 6y ago
I firmly believe this. It is taking the digitization of the world to the last economic layer: governance and law. But I also believe we are very very early, and it will take maybe 30 years to develop to start massively transforming industries.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  > governance and law. from the very few I know, I didn't see governance and law in blockchain projects. What I perceived is a never ending shared network of operations that can basically replace companies.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    The conceptual model is of the governance being in the consensus layer, which operates independently of other political systems, and the law being in the programmatic contracts the blockchain executes. But yes, there are other ways it can be conceived, and yours seems valid.

cocktailpeanuts 6y ago

This is basically a bespoke blockchain that uses BTC as oracle. It's not a smart contracts "on Bitcoin". By this logic, I could write an ERC20 token on ETH and use some BTC state, and call it "smart contracts on Bitcoin".

muneeb 6y ago
Muneeb here, Stacks co-founder. So it does not use Bitcoin as oracle. It uses Bitcoin as a settlement layer. (Oracles like Chainlink can be, and are being, built using Clarity lang for Stacks blockchain itself.) For using Bitcoin state on Ethereum, you'll need to implement Bitcoin SPV proofs. It's entirely possible but fairly complicated to do that given (a) Ethereum is a separate network that can fork independently from Bitcoin (Clarity contracts on Stacks fork with Bitcoin), and (b) Eth miners have no native visibility into Bitcoin state (Stacks miners have full visibility into Bitcoin state). Possible but more complicated. Further, any asset generation and transfers etc on such ERC20 asset would have nothing to with Bitcoin vs on Stacks all asset generation and transfers etc settle on Bitcoin and are secured by the Bitcoin main blockchain.
- cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
  People are asking you why this counts as "on Bitcoin", and you've been saying throughout this thread it's because it has access to the Bitcoin ledger data. My point is that it pretty much sounds like you're using BTC as an "oracle" (and of course, you're using BTC as settlement, but that's a given, and also doesn't qualify as being "on bitcoin"). Stacks is a separate ledger that pegs itself to Bitcoin, not "on". "Smart contracts on Bitcoin" would be something that's entirely built on the Bitcoin ledger and every smart contract transaction is a Bitcoin transaction that settles.
  - muneeb 6y ago
    What you are describing is similar to what Stacks 1.0 was i.e., directly on top of the Bitcoin chain -- a virtualchain. Every Stacks 1.0 transaction was a Bitcoin transaction. The lessons we learned from that deployment for 2+ years is that (a) it doesn't scale that well and (b) it's very hard to modify Bitcoin and get new changes accepted (for good reason), so you end up with very limited scripting. To fix the two limitations of Stacks 1.0, we worked on Stacks 2.0 which has a separate blockchain (so scalability independent of Bitcoin) where settlements still happen on Bitcoin and, more importantly, a full smart contract language without modifying Bitcoin itself: https://clarity-lang.org https://clarity-lang.org

exabrial 6y ago

Please, enough with Bitcoin. It's an environmental disaster.

staplers 6y ago
So is the internet and computers and cars.
px43 6y ago
It's only economical to mine in areas with significant excess power, mostly around dams, but also wind farms and regions powered by geothermal. If anything, mining subsidizes green energy projects, and drives interest in cheaper and more efficient energy production, as well as more efficient semiconductor technologies.
- exabrial 6y ago
  I really don't think that's true except in pockets of the usa or europe with free markets (the power part)
  - px43 6y ago
    Not at all. Also very much true in China. Miners are largely concentrated around the Sichuan area, which is also well known for their massive investments in hydroelectric power.
    - exabrial 6y ago
      So essentially it's wasted as heat instead of being used to replace carbon sourced sources
- terse_malvolio 6y ago
  Subsidize? I think it's the opposite. Mining parasitizes on the cheapness of electric power.
  - 6y ago

josh2600 6y ago

Edit 3: See my nested child comment. My understanding (from a 2010 conversation with a friend who was deep in btc) was that there was a time where bitcoin scripting could cause transactions to appear onchain that would look valid to a novice but would not actually perform the actions described such that a scam could be perpetrated. I have not done the work to validate these claims. I stand by my comments on Eth and Satoshi Dice. The crazy thing is: bitcoin was ethereum. The community killed scripting because it was antithetical to the thing that makes money in BTC: trust. The constant flow of n00bs coming in who got their transactions reversed by OP codes and said "BUT I THOUGHT BITCOIN TRANSACTIONS WERE IRREVERSIBLE!!?!?!!?!?!1111" was eroding trust in the ecosystem. Really, I think the beginning of bitcoin jumping the shark was Satoshi Dice: https://www.coindesk.com/company/satoshidice https://www.coindesk.com/company/satoshidice. Anyways, Bitcoin off-chain scripting won't replace Eth anymore than any other off-chain scripting system will replace Eth. If this kills Eth it will be because people don't want on-chain scripting, not because people want off-chain scripting on bitcoin (ergo, the meta problem is that on-chain scripting doesn't scale in every sense of the word scale; fees, tx speed, finality, etc). Caveat emptor: it's entirely possible this company could work or take off. In crypto, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Edit: Just to be extra clear, the problems with ethereum, to me at least, aren't actually on-chain scaling; that feels solvable. What feels unsolvable to me is two things: 1) turing completeness and 2) compilation malleability (if the compiler/machine can change but the code can't, guess what, old code's behavior becomes less predictable over time... computing systems with longevity gain minimal entropy over time). Edit 2: The only rational way I can make sense of turing completeness and compilation malleability as features is if the ecosystem is engineering ecological behavior in, that is to say: old programs should become less valuable unless they accurately predicted the future. Maybe that's rational?

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
> The community killed scripting because it was antithetical to the thing that makes money in BTC: trust. The constant flow of n00bs coming in who got their transactions reversed by OP codes and said "BUT I THOUGHT BITCOIN TRANSACTIONS WERE IRREVERSIBLE!!?!?!!?!?!1111" was eroding trust in the ecosystem. I never heard of all of this having happened. To my knowledge Bitcoin's scripting language was not trimmed, it was in fact extended over the years by various BIPs [1]. What's your source for these statements? [1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips https://github.com/bitcoin/bips

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago

So it's a sidechain that ocassionally checks in it's state to bitcoin's main chain? And you can lock up BTC on the mainchain to use it on the sidechain?

everfree 6y ago
In essence, yes, it's a sidechain. From their site: > Like Bitcoin, Stacks is a layer-1 blockchain. Proof of Transfer connects it to Bitcoin with a 1:1 block ratio.
- jude- 6y ago
  Not really. The key difference is the degree of involvement Bitcoin miners have in Stacks mining. In side-chains, Bitcoin miners would need to opt-in to mining the side-chain and validate its blocks. In Stacks, Bitcoin miners only need to include the Stacks miners' block-commitment transactions into Bitcoin blocks. Since block-commitment transactions look like normal BTC transactions, no Bitcoin miner involvement is necessary beyond what they're already doing. The full protocol description can be found in https://github.com/stacksgov/sips https://github.com/stacksgov/sips (see SIP-001 and SIP-007 in particular).
muneeb 6y ago
The design can be thought of similar to a side chain but it's not really a side chain. It uses a new type of consensus, called Proof of Transfer (PoX). Stacks miners have visibility into both the Bitcoin chain and the Stacks chain. Leader election happens on Bitcoin and winning leader writes blocks on the Stacks chain. Details: https://blockstack.org/pox.pdf https://blockstack.org/pox.pdf

qixxiq 6y ago

Following the links down a hole a little bit I saw this statement: "Bitcoin is by far the largest and most secure blockchain"[1] Sure it's the largest, but it seems ETH2 might now be the most secure. It (at current prices) has $2,400,000,000 staked in the network. Sure this is still in the league of nation states to corrupt, but the penalties for breaking the rules are _so much higher_. Given that, and the fact that Ethereum is based around smart contracts, I find it hard to believe that this could compete with ETH2. [1] https://blog.blockstack.org/realizing-web-3-proof-of-transfer-mining-with-bitcoin/ https://blog.blockstack.org/realizing-web-3-proof-of-transfe...

cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
having a lot of money staked doesn't mean it's secure. The security model of Bitcoin comes from proof of work, which most people complain as being waste. But it's not actually waste. It's secure because miners have to keep working hard and "wasting energy" because the network is worth protecting (and only if the network is worth protecting). With proof of stake, the stakers only need to make an investment once in the beginning, so it results in rich get richer, and the network is essentially "protected" by those who do not keep working hard to protect the ledger. This suffers from the same flaw that exists in the real world financial system. The whole system could collapse overnight like a domino if something goes wrong. It's much more unlikely for something like that to happen for Proof of Work because miners invest heavily in constantly innovating and investing back into the network. To summarize, in theory Bitcoin is secure exactly because miners "waste" energy. Without wasting energy, all the protection is just a mirage.
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  I'm not sure of the argument - so it results in rich get richer In PoW, the same 'rich get richer' applies - miners can buy more mining rigs and thus it compounds the same? miners invest heavily in constantly innovating and investing back into the network In PoS, is this not exactly the same, if not even more true? Stakers are by definition highly invested into the network The whole system could collapse overnight like a domino if something goes wrong Could you elaborate on this, why is this more likely in PoS over PoW? PoW had decreased decentralization substantially to only happen in regions where electricity is the cheapest. PoS at least prevents this problem.

jbirer 6y ago

Putting lipstick on a pig. Ethereum exists for a reason.

keepalive 6y ago

Sell drugs be millionaire, ez

ejanus 6y ago

Is this a side-chain with independent EVM and also mineable? I need a simple and clear explanation of what stack 2.0 is?

predictmktegirl 6y ago

Honestly, I like the idea, although I'd prefer a pure L2 for security rather than a sidechain, which is what this appears to be. Unfortunately, I don't think this is a tech problem. How do you get the devs to move en masse from Ethereum back to BTC? The network effects are just so enormous, it feels like a catastrophic failure needs to happen to Eth at this point. I'll check it out and play around, will never say never. I'm just generally skeptical of sidechains because why can't Eth just be a sidechain to BTC, or various incarnations of the same end like atomic swaps, BTC collateralization, etc?

bouncycastle 6y ago

This is not on Bitcoin, but a seperate network with its own token (STX) that is secured by "Proof of Transfer" - see https://www.stacks.co/ https://www.stacks.co/ Also, it could, in theory, be attached to Ethereum too, and probably more trivial to do. These networks come with their own security guarantees, trade-offs & governance pitfalls, but unfortunately do not mention these on their home page of their shiny professionally designed website. I also don't see a future for these things on Bitcoin, because as soon as bitcoin block rewards diminish, the miners would need to be paid from transaction fees. However, for the miners to be profitable, the transaction fees would need to increase an order of a magnitude - making solutions such as these potentially expensive and infeasible. There were a few projects like this in the past, one from memory was called Counterparty. Not sure what happened to that. I guess the 10 minute block times and high fees might have been the culprit. Conclusion: Anybody promoting this is just trying to sell their bag of STX tokens.

kikowi 6y ago

People tried to gain influence over the Bitcoin network in the past and they never succeded. Its much like the power of the Queen in United Kingdom. Theoretically she could overthrown the government, but in practice that will never happen. Several Bitcoin mining pools tried to attack the network in the past, but the majority of their hashpower vanished and new hashpower appeared to protect the network. The fact that Bitcoin was able to sustain security for 12 years makes it so valuable (especially because the incentive to take over is worth so much (market cap of $0.7T). Ethereum's new PoS might be better in the future, however we are still many years away from properly verifing that. However I don't think it is possible to theoretically design a system that is secure and cheap to sustain at the same time. I believe security comes from expensivness (miners energy waste and slow transactions).

worik 6y ago

Why? Still have not seen a use case for crypto currencies that is honest, legal, and not a waste. A lot of naivety and scamming as far as I can tell. I am completely stumped as to why anybody who has programmed a computer and experienced how hard it is to get them right would think smart contracts are a better idea than plain old legal ones. I am not saying that the current arrangements around private property, money, law, and power are good. I just do not see crypto currencies disrupting them. Nor smart contracts. So, why?