Bitcoin developer Eric Wall has described the recent BitVM research paper as “stunning” and ultimately a “technological dead end” for Bitcoin smart contracts.
The BitVM paper covered in an October 9 crypto.news report proposes a method for running complex calculations and smart contracts on Bitcoin without changing consensus rules. This is achieved using a prover-verifier model, where the prover makes a claim about the result of an off-chain computation, and the verifier can succinctly check its validity on-chain.
On a Twitter wireWall described two perspectives on BitVM. On the one hand, he says the idea that Bitcoin can “perform general-purpose calculations… no matter how impractical, burdensome or janky that may be… is quite mind-boggling.” He states that being able to verify arbitrary logic on Bitcoin “without changes” is impressive.
However, Wall also claims that BitVM is likely a “technological dead end” for Bitcoin. He states that the overhead will be “huge” and that it will take “years to get even a small use case into production.” Moreover, he believes that BitVM “nerdsnip people and blocks real development.”
While Wall finds the conceptual idea behind BitVM exciting, he appears to find the proposal too complex and impractical to provide meaningful smart contract capabilities for Bitcoin anytime soon. This is consistent with criticism from other experts, such as Adam Back, co-founder of Blockstream, that BitVM is essentially a generalization of existing work on zero-knowledge proofs and two-party computation.
