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 <p class="is-style-lead">Bitcoin developer Eric Wall has described the recent BitVM research paper as both “mindblowing” yet ultimately a “technological dead end” for Bitcoin smart contracts.</p>
 <p>The BitVM paper covered in an Oct. 9 crypto.news report, proposes a method for executing complex computations and smart contracts on Bitcoin without modifying its 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.</p>
 <p>In a Twitter thread, Wall described two perspectives on BitVM. On one hand, he says the idea that Bitcoin can “do general purpose computation…no matter how <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" title="impractical" href="https://thebittimes.com/tag/impractical.html">impractical</a>, burdensome, or janky that is…is kind of mindblowing.” He states that being able to verify arbitrary logic on Bitcoin “with no changes” is impressive.</p>
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 <p>However, Wall also asserts that BitVM is likely a “technological dead end” for Bitcoin. He argues the overhead will be “massive” and it will take “years to get even a small use case to production.” Additionally, he believes BitVM will “nerdsnipe people and stall real development.”</p>
 <p>While Wall finds the conceptual idea behind BitVM exciting, he seems to view the proposal as too complex and <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" title="impractical" href="https://thebittimes.com/tag/impractical.html">impractical</a> to provide meaningful smart contract capabilities for Bitcoin anytime soon. This aligns with critiques from other experts, like Blockstream co-founder Adam Back, that BitVM is essentially a generalization of existing work in zero-knowledge proofs and two-party computation.</p>
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<p>Source: <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://thebittimes.com/mindblowing-yet-impractical-eric-wall-s-perspective-on-bitvm-tbt66008.html">https://thebittimes.com/mindblowing-yet-impractical-eric-wall-s-perspective-on-bitvm-tbt66008.html</a></p>

“Mindblowing” yet impractical: Eric Wall’s perspective on BitVM

TheBitTimes

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