Bitcoin Enthusiast Releases BitVM Whitepaper – Introducing Ethereum-Style Contracts on the Bitcoin Network
Mitchell Nixon
Robin Linus, the white paper’s author, designed BitVM’s framework by drawing inspiration from Ethereum’s optimistic rollups with fraud proofs and incorporating recent advancements in Merkle tree technology.
A Bitcoin developer has put forth an innovative approach to introduce more versatile off-chain smart contracts to Bitcoin without the necessity of a soft fork.
Revealed in a white paper published on October 9th, entitled “BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin” by Robin Linus, the project lead at ZeroSync, BitVM makes it possible to implement Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts without making any changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules.
"Any computable function can be verified on Bitcoin"https://t.co/Itf9UHos0C pic.twitter.com/CLQv49Ydsg
— яobin linus (@robin_linus) October 9, 2023
A Turing Complete system possesses the theoretical capability to solve any computational problem.
With BitVM, the processing of Bitcoin contract logic would occur off-chain, while validation would take place on the Bitcoin network, similar to Ethereum’s optimistic rollups.
BitVM’s design is rooted in fraud proofs and a challenge-response model. In this model, a “prover” can assert claims, and a “verifier” can employ fraud-proof mechanisms to penalise the prover in cases of false claims.
Linus elucidated that Bitcoin, in its current state, is constrained to fundamental operations like signatures, timelocks, and hashlocks. However, BitVM has the potential to expand these capabilities, enabling the execution of a wide range of compelling applications.
“Potential applications include games like Chess, Go, or Poker, and particularly, verification of validity proofs in Bitcoin contracts.”
“Additionally, it might be possible to bridge BTC to foreign chains, build a prediction market, or emulate novel opcodes,” stated Linus.
Linus mentioned a constraint of this model is its confinement to a two-party scenario, involving a prover and a verifier, and it necessitates a substantial amount of off-chain computation and communication to execute programs.
Linus also outlined the next crucial step as achieving complete implementation of BitVM, alongside Tree++, a high-level programming language designed for creating and debugging Bitcoin contracts.
The activation of BitVM was made possible by the Taproot soft fork, which was implemented in November 2021.
Linus acknowledged the influence of Ethereum’s research on optimistic rollups and a study on Merkle Trees as contributing factors in the creation of the eight-page white paper.