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Simple, templated Scripts are allowed in Bitcoin, but most of the functionality is disabled for security reasons. It is also not Turing-complete

• nullc 13y ago
  > Simple, templated Scripts are allowed in Bitcoin This is a common misconception. Stock nodes won't relay transactions with weird scripts by default, but they're perfectly valid in the blockchain and verified by all nodes once someone configured to mine them has mined them. > It is also not Turing-complete Nor, pedantically, is what etherum proposes. Nothing time and space limited is. What consensus systems like Bitcoin (and alt coins) do, however, is not executing programs in so much as that they are verifying an execution transcript that someone else performed (which is why all nodes compute the same values). Verification of an transcript of even arbitrary program execution is in P— you don't technically need turing completeness to express it. Though some forms of transcript expression may be more efficient. What Bitcoin does has the advantage of making the computationally work simply statically decidable— it's proportional to script size— and this relation means that— within reason— there is only one limited resource transactions have to worry about consuming, which makes the appropriate fee model obvious.