Thread by @muneeb

The discussion below is the classic misunderstanding most people have about Ethereum and Bitcoin differences.

Tweet thread 👇

https://twitter.com/lastmjs/status/1372984835745083398

1/ Turing completeness is not a desirable property for smart contracts. What you mean/want here is expressiveness i.e, developers can easily write any logic.

You can be expressive with *decidable* languages. Being Turing complete i.e, not decidable is a security problem.

2/ There is nothing fundamental about Bitcoin that stops smart contracts.

Bitcoin designers, very carefully, built it so that the base layer has a small attack vector (i.e, limited script).

This leaves several options open to implementing smart contracts.

3/ Bitcoin smart contracts, like it or not, are already here.

In fact, they’re more powerful because (a) Bitcoin has established itself as a trillion dollar hard money, (b) they benefit from the secure base layer, and (c) the settlement design is scalable.

4/ Eth 2 research after playing around with “sharding” type ideas is effectively dropping the concept of smart contracts on multiple shards.

Layer 2s are a lot more realistic. So what’s the difference between layer 2 contracts on Eth PoW vs layer 2 contracts on BTC PoW? A: None

5/ Lets put layer 2s aside.

Breakthroughs like PoX consensus (that enables state changes on Bitcoin) and Clarity language (which has direct visibility into Bitcoin state) means that developers can built anything they can build in Solidity directly on Bitcoin.

6/ The only valid argument for Ethereum and Bitcoin differences when it comes to smart contracts is that (a) there are certain lego blocks on Eth (like AMMs, stablecoins) that are not yet on BTC, and (b) there are more developers currently building on Ethereum.

Fair enough.

7/ The existence of lego blocks and more devs is not a tech advantage. If anything, I consider the Turing-complete approach technically problematic.

There are AMMs and stablecoins etc., already appearing with new BTC stack.

8/ Developers will go wherever market opportunities are and wherever the sophisticated tooling is.

Bitcoin has a trillion-dollar crypto capital ready to be deployed in smart contracts. And sophisticated developers understand the benefits of decidable langs and formal proofs.

9/ Next time someone tells you Bitcoin doesn’t have smart contracts, send them to stacking.club and ask them how is $440M capital locked earning 21% BTC yield then? There is no company behind this, it’s a Clarity smart contract.

10/ In summary:

Turing-completeness is not what you want. You mean you want an expressive language that is secure: that’s called a decidable language (Solidity is not decidable).

P.S: Gold is a rock, Bitcoin is not a fucking rock: it has smart contracts.