Bitcoin programmer Eric Wall thinks the new BitVM research paper is amazing but he also thinks it won’t really help Bitcoin smart contracts.
The BitVM paper was mentioned in an October article. A news report from crypto experts suggests a way to do difficult math and smart contracts on Bitcoin without changing its rules. This is done using a model where someone makes a claim about a computation, and someone else can easily check if it’s true.
On Twitter, Wall talked about two different views on BitVM. He thinks it’s amazing that Bitcoin can be used for all kinds of tasks, even if it’s not very practical. He is impressed that Bitcoin can confirm any type of logic without needing any adjustments.
However, Wall also says that BitVM might not be useful for Bitcoin in the future. He says it will cost a lot of money and time to get even a small project working. He also thinks BitVM will distract people and slow down real progress.
Wall thinks the idea of BitVM is interesting, but he thinks it’s too hard and not useful for Bitcoin’s smart contracts right now. This matches what other experts, like Adam Back from Blockstream, have said, that BitVM is basically a broadening of ideas already used in zero-knowledge proofs and two-party computation.
