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I remember Counterparty (XCP) tried something like this a long time ago. Not full blown smart contracts, but things like asset creation (tokens) and decentraliz

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
uncletammy 6y ago
I came here to say that. Here's a super informative thread laying out those events from the perspective of one of the Decred developers. https://old.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pitch_for_decred/dmcer4d/ https://old.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pi... TLDR: Smart contracts on BTC were intentionally strangled because it would necessitate bigger blocks. At the same time, BTC core devs were gearing up to start their sad push in creating artificial scarcity on a perfectly functional blockchain by reneging on the agreement they made to increase the block size. They traded their ideals to get rich and all that momentum was lost. Instead of peer to peer cash, we're all left with a thousand useless ponzi schemes and a handful of promising coins that can't work together to actually achieve Satoshi's goal.
- cheaprentalyeti 6y ago
  At the moment the Bitcoin blockchain size is some 310 gb while the bitcoin cash blockchain, with its larger blocks, is some 180 gb. I just looked it up. (I think I looked it up the last time I saw this argument too.) (I also can't easily find it for BSV, the search turned up too many articles about how they're increasing their block size to 2 GB.)
  - uncletammy 6y ago
    I dont follow. What does the size of either of those blockchains have to do with the discussion? What point are you making?
    - pharmakom 6y ago
      At the time there was the argument that larger blocks were bad because they would increase the size of the chain and prevent casual users from storing the whole chain and verifying it themselves. I think the chain was already too big for casual users at that point!
      - uncletammy 6y ago
        Oh right. Yeah thats absolutely true. I always thought the argument that full nodes should be inexpensive to operate made a lot of sense. But keeping blocks small would obviously lead (and clearly did) to transaction costs high enough to price out most people that actually want to use it. Wait for the lightning network is an insulting reason to kill the p2p cash use case, which in my opinion is the only thing that makes the "store of value" use case work.
student2k 6y ago
Sad to ear all that kind of stories, Governance is a real issue of bitcoin, and it is only gone get worst. I am OK with it, you just have to assume nothing will ever change with bitcoin.... ...as long as there is another place for changes happen. If you want change stuff you need governance, take a look at decred.
px43 6y ago
Notably, Vitalik was run out on a rail by small blockers (mostly LukeJr) when he was trying to work on smart contracts on BTC back in the day. This is the entire reason he launched Ethereum, and took with him everyone else interested in working on smart contracts. Smart contracts are neat. Bitcoin is neat. Smart contracts on Bitcoin could have been a thing, but now it's too late. There is almost zero intersection between BTC maximalists and people who think smart contracts on BTC are a good idea.
- midmagico 6y ago
  These are of course multiple well-publicized but zero-fact assertions used as propaganda to trick people into ethereum and other altcoin bags.
  - grubles 6y ago
    It's hard to believe people are still repeating these verifiable lies.
    - midmagico 6y ago
      The narratives are designed to be earwormy, and everyone wants to live in a spy novel filled with scary conspiracies, so when they hear it, it slips in the backdoor cognitive holes, and they do only minimal "verification" if any at all, and accept it, and then repeat it. It's also very easy to blame an all-powerful adversary for all your woes—did you lose money trading? Oh, that was gmax's fault. Did you get scammed? Oh, that was blockstream's fault. If they'd just did X, then the scam wouldn't have happened in the first place. Did your friend tell you something secretive that "only he knows" and it's "not public knowledge"? Well obviously the core devs are behind it. The absurdity is great when the altcoiners are staring at Bitcoin's behemoth economy with jealous eyes amplifying the narratives they sometimes even know are totally false. More insidious of course are the lies that are false but simple, where the factually verifiable truth is directly contrary but complex, like the foolish lie about gmax stealing credit, or Vitalik asserting that he was planning Ethereum until the core devs blocked him. It's easy for outsiders to be infected via their usual lines and information feeds. And, of course, Bitcoin has no marketing department, so obviously defence thereof is a long, painstaking process of careful dismantling and debunking over a long period of time. Thankfully, the actually helpful, intelligent, and ultra-competent people that are the safest to align with are people on whom these kinds of lies are basically completely ineffectual, so we tend to win, in that respect, just by default.
PhantomPhreak 6y ago
Yup. Creator of Counterparty here. It's funny to think that if the Core devs hadn't be so incredibly resistant to people using the Bitcoin blockchain in unexpected ways, Ethereum wouldn't exist in its current form. See https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/929804867568373760 https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/929804867568373760
- grubles 6y ago
  Vitalik's claim is a lie. No "OP_RETURN wars" happened. It's a complete fabrication. See https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1187470076833697794 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1187470076833697794
  - PhantomPhreak 6y ago
    I strongly disagree with the way that Ethereum was launched and the way that it was run---indeed Ethereum was a competitor of Counterparty's, with a polar opposite approach and ethos---but Greg Maxwell is the one that's rewriting history there.
  - zionic 6y ago
    Lol are you honestly linking your own twitter as a source
    - hanniabu 6y ago
      Didn't you see the username? It's clearly not him =P
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    I remember the hostility by certain Core devs to OP_RETURN being used for "ulterior" purposes. I remember the push to reduce the size of OP_RETURN to 40 bytes to sabotage smart contracts. source: https://www.coindesk.com/developers-battle-bitcoin-block-chain https://www.coindesk.com/developers-battle-bitcoin-block-cha...
    - 6y ago
hanniabu 6y ago
I don't think there'll be any issue since it's a separate chain and just submitting checkpoints to bitcoin so they can pretend they're a sidechain for marketing hype.

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

uncletammy 6y ago

I came here to say that. Here's a super informative thread laying out those events from the perspective of one of the Decred developers. https://old.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pitch_for_decred/dmcer4d/ https://old.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pi... TLDR: Smart contracts on BTC were intentionally strangled because it would necessitate bigger blocks. At the same time, BTC core devs were gearing up to start their sad push in creating artificial scarcity on a perfectly functional blockchain by reneging on the agreement they made to increase the block size. They traded their ideals to get rich and all that momentum was lost. Instead of peer to peer cash, we're all left with a thousand useless ponzi schemes and a handful of promising coins that can't work together to actually achieve Satoshi's goal.

cheaprentalyeti 6y ago
At the moment the Bitcoin blockchain size is some 310 gb while the bitcoin cash blockchain, with its larger blocks, is some 180 gb. I just looked it up. (I think I looked it up the last time I saw this argument too.) (I also can't easily find it for BSV, the search turned up too many articles about how they're increasing their block size to 2 GB.)
- uncletammy 6y ago
  I dont follow. What does the size of either of those blockchains have to do with the discussion? What point are you making?
  - pharmakom 6y ago
    At the time there was the argument that larger blocks were bad because they would increase the size of the chain and prevent casual users from storing the whole chain and verifying it themselves. I think the chain was already too big for casual users at that point!
    - uncletammy 6y ago
      Oh right. Yeah thats absolutely true. I always thought the argument that full nodes should be inexpensive to operate made a lot of sense. But keeping blocks small would obviously lead (and clearly did) to transaction costs high enough to price out most people that actually want to use it. Wait for the lightning network is an insulting reason to kill the p2p cash use case, which in my opinion is the only thing that makes the "store of value" use case work.

student2k 6y ago

Sad to ear all that kind of stories, Governance is a real issue of bitcoin, and it is only gone get worst. I am OK with it, you just have to assume nothing will ever change with bitcoin.... ...as long as there is another place for changes happen. If you want change stuff you need governance, take a look at decred.

px43 6y ago

Notably, Vitalik was run out on a rail by small blockers (mostly LukeJr) when he was trying to work on smart contracts on BTC back in the day. This is the entire reason he launched Ethereum, and took with him everyone else interested in working on smart contracts. Smart contracts are neat. Bitcoin is neat. Smart contracts on Bitcoin could have been a thing, but now it's too late. There is almost zero intersection between BTC maximalists and people who think smart contracts on BTC are a good idea.

midmagico 6y ago
These are of course multiple well-publicized but zero-fact assertions used as propaganda to trick people into ethereum and other altcoin bags.
- grubles 6y ago
  It's hard to believe people are still repeating these verifiable lies.
  - midmagico 6y ago
    The narratives are designed to be earwormy, and everyone wants to live in a spy novel filled with scary conspiracies, so when they hear it, it slips in the backdoor cognitive holes, and they do only minimal "verification" if any at all, and accept it, and then repeat it. It's also very easy to blame an all-powerful adversary for all your woes—did you lose money trading? Oh, that was gmax's fault. Did you get scammed? Oh, that was blockstream's fault. If they'd just did X, then the scam wouldn't have happened in the first place. Did your friend tell you something secretive that "only he knows" and it's "not public knowledge"? Well obviously the core devs are behind it. The absurdity is great when the altcoiners are staring at Bitcoin's behemoth economy with jealous eyes amplifying the narratives they sometimes even know are totally false. More insidious of course are the lies that are false but simple, where the factually verifiable truth is directly contrary but complex, like the foolish lie about gmax stealing credit, or Vitalik asserting that he was planning Ethereum until the core devs blocked him. It's easy for outsiders to be infected via their usual lines and information feeds. And, of course, Bitcoin has no marketing department, so obviously defence thereof is a long, painstaking process of careful dismantling and debunking over a long period of time. Thankfully, the actually helpful, intelligent, and ultra-competent people that are the safest to align with are people on whom these kinds of lies are basically completely ineffectual, so we tend to win, in that respect, just by default.

PhantomPhreak 6y ago

Yup. Creator of Counterparty here. It's funny to think that if the Core devs hadn't be so incredibly resistant to people using the Bitcoin blockchain in unexpected ways, Ethereum wouldn't exist in its current form. See https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/929804867568373760 https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/929804867568373760

grubles 6y ago
Vitalik's claim is a lie. No "OP_RETURN wars" happened. It's a complete fabrication. See https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1187470076833697794 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1187470076833697794
- PhantomPhreak 6y ago
  I strongly disagree with the way that Ethereum was launched and the way that it was run---indeed Ethereum was a competitor of Counterparty's, with a polar opposite approach and ethos---but Greg Maxwell is the one that's rewriting history there.
- zionic 6y ago
  Lol are you honestly linking your own twitter as a source
  - hanniabu 6y ago
    Didn't you see the username? It's clearly not him =P
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  I remember the hostility by certain Core devs to OP_RETURN being used for "ulterior" purposes. I remember the push to reduce the size of OP_RETURN to 40 bytes to sabotage smart contracts. source: https://www.coindesk.com/developers-battle-bitcoin-block-chain https://www.coindesk.com/developers-battle-bitcoin-block-cha...
  - 6y ago

hanniabu 6y ago

I don't think there'll be any issue since it's a separate chain and just submitting checkpoints to bitcoin so they can pretend they're a sidechain for marketing hype.