Topic: Smart Contract in Bitcoin (Read 4766 times)

XCP ,OMNI,RSK
Three Bitcoin smartcontract,look forward to the new era of btc.

Dryja had a talk on updating this concept at Scaling Bitcoin in Stanford -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7045&v=LDF8bOEqXt4 (other presentations are here: https://scalingbitcoin.org/presentations)

The PDF is here: https://adiabat.github.io/dlc.pdf

Other Links:

https://coinjournal.net/bitcoins-lightning-network-can-used-decentralized-betting-platform/

Notable Quote:

“These things work great with friends, but bitcoin is the currency of enemies” - Thaddeus "Tadge" Dryja

Thanks man

A smart contract does not explicitly have to be based on ethereums blockchain. Neither does it have to be decentralized.
Ethereum is not the only platform which introduced smart contracts on the blockchain. But it is the most accepted and adopted.
Smart contracts (in future) could also be handled by a blockchain which is not completely decentralized. Licences, for example, could be easily
handled via smart contracts on a (non-public) "centralized blockchain".

This smart contract is a piece of code that runs on ethereum's blockchain and as such is by definition decentralized. It is a self executing contracts with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly into line of code. It does not care about who wrong whom or what your name is.Once it live on ethereum's blockchain, no one can alter it.

yup, here we go! thx so much, fully agree 
This is why I raised this question. The trolls here seem to think, that smart contracts = turing complete machine, is fancy coding language (which removes me from the burden of using my brain), is ETHEREUM transported into Bitcoin, cause flippening will happen (haha, what a laugh!!!), and much more stupid reasons. Those noobs seem to not even know what they are talking about...

I should stop ranting here, and show how to provide s.th. to the community (still hoping that some people come out of there noob zone and start to learn):
 
BITCOIN HAS ALREADY SMART CONTRACTS!
Examples and use cases:

e.g. the link you mentioned (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0112.mediawiki):

or something like this:
or more precise:
n-of-m multisig is the easiest form of a contract.
escrow service is the next layer (as in examples above).
And then we can create very specific constructs like:
CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY: lock some Satoshis until a specific number of block have passed, before I can use them, and if I really, really need the coins before, have a 2-3 multisig to release them immedeatly
CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY: lock some Satoshis until a specific number of block appears (aka my son is 18 years old...), but use a 2-3 multisig to release the funds in case funds are required earlier
It goes even up to the point where you can create tx spends, where the hash of a condition must be equal to a previously defined value.
I see some limitations when trying to use Oracles (aka data from "outsides"), maybe data from exchanges, or from real live (in case of death). 

Some more example in Andreas' book "Mastering Bitcoin" (second edition) in the chapter "Timelocks".
or here in the forum
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/is-this-bip65-sample-script-standard-1300723
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/double-check-my-relative-locktime-script-1558207
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/how-to-use-opchecksequenceverify-1952248
or here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4kit49/is_it_safe_to_use_cltv_for_recurring_payments/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4p4klg/bitcoin_core_project_the_csv_soft_fork_has/d4i01he/
and here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Timelock
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts

And look at the way how exchanges store much of the funds into cold wallets automatically. These are also smart contracts.
Also the scripting language allows up to 10 kilobytes of code (!), to create smart contracts.
SO YES; BITCOIN HAS SMART CONTRACTS!

I haven't seen a single example by noobs, what a smart contract is, but a lot about there limitations ("scripting is dumb, cause usage of brain to learn scripting language is too complicated for me"). All are complaining that things need to get improved, without saying, what does not work in bitcoin. This is reddit niveau. Reddit it is the right forum to complain, without providing any efforts to improve bitcoin. Even better, there you can improve your reputation by posting much of this shit. Go there... ooops, I wanted to stop ranting 

I think I want to say, look at the examples, tell us what you want to do, what you think is missing, and how we can help to implement smart contracts.

Actually this is pretty clear defined: "A smart contract is a computer protocol intended to facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract
Smart contracts in combination with crypto currencies makes it a system where you dont have to trust a person. A contract will be enforced. Decentralized.



Anything could be those use cases. For example some escrow service or a whole signature campaign which pays out per posts could be created.
Anything you can program can be coded into a smart contract.

I am curious about the "old tech" and "new tech", is it possible that Ethereum replace bitcoin in the future?

We will see another coin split if this ever happens.Though i believe ETHS smart contract is one of its kind and that is solving its purpose already.
And i donot think bitcoin also need smart contact feather at all.

I think the value of ethereum will not dip. My point of view is that if bitcoin introduces the smart contracts those security and privacy will improve and it might change the fact that bitcoin will go higher to its prize from now. I think it will not get ethereum to go dip maybe ethereum will go high a little bit too.

I think that extending bitcoin capabilities through hardcoded smart-contracts is one thing and would be great, but attaching even with a sidechain "turing complete" VM is a most horrible idea ever. Look at the Ethereum with 10x more security and scalability issues.

If that happens, the ETH will no longer be valid
But it costs too much network resources and it will make the miners disagree

Smart contract is the reason why Ethereum is the main challenger to Bitcoin.

A Bitcoin ERC20 like + smart contract would kill Ethereum.

Howewer, Bitcoin is mainly used as a store value while Ethereum is a platform used for creating Dapp

I think Smart contract could be a  very important and necessary feature for Bitcoin. It is like a Mobile app doing some automated and very Basic  stuff like waking you up at 7am, answer phone calls when you're unavailable or sending emails/text messages at a specified time.
There are times I get seriously limited using Bitcoin and all I can think of is moving to Cryptocurrencies with smart contracts.

Question is how easy can Smart Contract be implemented  Bitcoin. If it were that easy I guess developers would have implemented it long ago?

Yeah its possible to do anything with a hard fork. You could hard fork and add any feature. The problem is getting enough of the network onboard to make the network secure. So it has to be cost effective with hashing power. Cause a fork of bitcoin not only needs to compete with bitcoin but existing solutions like Ethereum.

Would it be possible to implement another hard fork in the bitcoin blockchain and introduce the smart contract logic instead of doing it on a side chain like RSK?

I don't think this is a route Bitcoin will take. There are many good examples of Coins for Smart Contract technology and Bitcoin sees itself as a pure Currency. Don't think this will happen.

Where can i find something like whitepaper for smart contracts on bitcoin? Do bitcoin realy need smart contracts? With confirmation of 10 minutes and litle size of blocks it will be slow and it will rise fees if i understand it right.  Also it is many work to do for developers to implement contracts, and at the same time they have many issues to figure out. Maybe it is better for bitcoin to stay as currency.

I think a lot of the people posting here don't know that bitcoin already has contracts. Multisig, timelocked coins, payment channels, trustless escrow etc all exist right now as smart contracts with their code on the bitcoin blockchain. Maybe this thread is instead thinking that we should make bitcoin smart contracts more like ethereum smart contracts.

Would that be a good idea? What are some cool things that ethereum smart contracts can do that we can't already do on bitcoin?

What about colored coins? We've been issuing tokens that way since I think before ethereum even existed. Not that I don't like what ether is doing (I do have a little) but I don't think that I see the appeal that everyone else seems to see.

I guess part of the problem is that everyone expects smart contracts to be these hyper-complex decentralized applications while in reality most decentralized applications either a) don't require a turing complete scripting language or b) don't require a blockchain.

The type of smart contracts that will see actual long-term usage will be simple ones like you described. Alas op_codes are hard and it's easier to sell tokens for the decentralized Uber of X.

I don't understand how is it possible to implement smart contracts into the Bitcoin Blockchain?

For a smart stable contract, development community needs a very powerful ecosystem. Ethereum is building it for last years and it's not complete yet.

Smart contracts will help us exchange money, property, shares, or anything of value in a transparent, conflict-free way while avoiding the services of a middleman 

I mean we are still waiting on 2x. You think smart contracts will come 5 years from now? What other features will other blockchains have by then?

Eventually it will, it might be an ETH killer.

what classifies a smart contract - looks like there is just a lot of buzz words, but no clear explanation.
What is a typical smart contract use case?
Is pay 2-of-3 already a smart contract? Or must it have an escrow?
Just a touring complete language?
(btw: ever tried to get oracle data in Ethereum smart contracts?)

Bitcoin has smart contract capabilities. E.g., when using CSV and CLTV, you have smart contracts. Some OP_IFs around it, and there you go. Even with P2SH. BIP65 and BIP68 show use cases.
So what do you have in mind, when talking about smart contracts? Are there any use cases examples for it?

In my point of view the smart contract address available in all the Bitcoins.

Yeah Ethereum did a big step forward using smart contracts. Ethereum uses the Turing-complete language to create smart contracts and stores information about the state in blockchain.

it is still too early to know how that would go but Bitcoin should not introduce it.

Yes. Bitcoin invented blockchain technology; Ethereum invented smart contracts. That is why there are no 1 and no 2 in this space. New alternative coins may implement a better smart contract implementation. To be the leader with wider general usage, the coin must scale very well also. We will see more competitions between bitcoin, ethereum and other alternative coins.

Exactly- the problem isn't lack of the basic capability, it's lack of an easy to consume solution for developers, an already bloated transaction confirm time lead, and prohibitive cost for it. Smart Contracts aren't an Ethereum innovation (despite a lot of press saying so which shows how little they understand anything crypto) but they did make it a first-class feature that does enable adoption of their platform. As Microsoft used to say when they were winning against all comers 'Developers! Developers! Developers!'- the question of whether cost per execution, security and other barriers for adoption either fade or become the sin that comes collecting like 32-bit applications, platform security and VB 6.0 was on Windows.

I think IF btc were to get to smartcontracts, it would be too late. ETH has the market on this and is improving. Having btc do smart contracts itself wouldnt make sense. Although i do see it being involved with payment settlement in smart contracts.

I agree with you`re.
smart-contracts currently widely discussed by most online media. Ethereum is considered the first coin to use a smart-contract, which in the end gavi birth to a class of its own for Ethereum (Ethereum rated best than other altcoins). With the smart-contracts many different speculators participating and playing here.
So, I think a smart contract is one means that can attract people, especially speculators.

It's never too late to implement a smart-contract system.
If, bitcoin implements this smart-contract system it is a necessity and it is time for bitcoin to used it, it aims to avoid bad assumptions about bitcoin, especially for the future.

But, "Why is ethereum considered less decentralized than bitcoin?....."

Getting segwit activated was hard enough let alone 2x. See the bitcoin cash fork. To add smart contracts is going to cause so many complaints from so many groups. Its politically a nightmare, I can't imagine it will come very soon. Unless bitcoin sees a real threat from Ethereum

How does a smart contract work on btc blockchain ?

I agree.  I think Ethereum has some real serious challenges.  The big advantage they have now is that they are currently the foundation on which so many other cryptos are built.  It's getting slower and more costly though. I've heard about Rootstock and think it's a great concept but I just don't know if going into the future Bitcoin will be stable enough for me to trust running smart contracts on it.   I think Ethereums immediate threats will come from EOS and Lisk.   

Bitcoin and Eth both have different roles to fill in the market. Bitcoin is like a store of value (e-gold) while Eth is like an actualy computer making decisions. I dont understand why some people want to turn Bitcoin into Eth, they can both exist.

That is a problem that has not been final to date, developers have to solve that problem without making more hardfork anymore. Bitcoin also requires the development of smart contracts or in the future all altcoin will be taken by ethereum. We know that the current eth is very ready to be paired with fiat, if bitcoin does not fix itself then one day the market volume will move significantly towards eth.

I am elated by the way you have highlighted the most important concern of bitcoin and bitcoin users which needs to be rectified at the earliest as it is inevitable to make bitcoin used by merchants and eCommerce without increasing the block size and there is a sense of fear that the transaction free might go up in future and might become like normal money exchange service so developers needs to focus on this as this is the need of the hour.

Implementing smart contract to bitcoin's feature is a not a priority to devs, the most concern of today's bitcoin is the block size and the the transaction capacity and transaction fees. If the two aforementioned are not able to solve the bitcoin's problem then the worldwide adaptability to masses for merchants and retails are only just a dream. Then we still can not call bitcoin  a currency but it is still an asset or commodity for trading but not as a future medium of exchange.

Developers probably waiting for other upgrades like Lightening Network to happen before implementing a smart contract?

Bitcoin does not need to have smart contract ... more does not mean better. It's value proposition is that it is a simple store of value and transferable coin. It does not need to add more functions which it cannot handle as it cannot scale at this stage. That is just my point of view. Others may not likely agree.

I agree. Plus the value of Ethereum is also the wide options that is offering in the blockchain world, for Bitcoin to reach the level of Ethereum still will need to walk a long path.

i also read that article but few people agree on that .
and even i think that its not possible for now to make a smartcontract  in bitcoin.

No. It is not smart contracts that gives Ethereum its value, but ICO speculation. There is a difference there. ICOs do not necessarily have to be "smart contracts" or "dapps". Most of them are nothing but tokens issued and traded that are backed by nothing but a whitepaper.

RSK is coming by the end of the year and CIVIC plans to use RSK.

The smart contracting options are already in all the coins, it not a feature thing really. It is a matter that no one bothers to use half of what these coins can do. They sue what they need and then ignore the rest, but it still there and always had been.

There are ways to do wild things with BTC and you will eventually see many of them.

Also there was counter party back in the day.

Looks promising

Smart contacts will be very useful in real estate. Problems related to payments to a broker or advertising firms are reduced to zero, as the Blockchain ledger would help contacted directly by the tenant, without intermediaries.

RSK brings smart contracts to Bitcoins as a sidechain. Check rsk.co

RSK code has been open sourced long ago.

You can check its github repo: https://github.com/RSKSmart

The test network has been alive for more than a year! working as a sidechain to the Bitcoin Testnet.

Production launch will be close to the end of the year.

This is quite expected and I think that this will not lead to any consequences other than a increase in the market cap of cryptocurrencies.

You should look at CommerceBlock.  They are implementing that technology.  www.commerceblock.com

The idea is that Bitcoin is "old tech". by adding smart contracts it now competes with "new tech" Ethereum.

what would be the benefit for bitcoint to impliment smart-contract ?

It is worth noting that while it is easy to write smart contracts on Ethereum, it is still very hard to write a bug-free smart contract. Hence the parity hack and what happened to the DAO. Easy to write more often than not translates to easy to fail. If your web app fails -- aw well, just fix it. If your non-reversible multi-million-dollar smart contract fails, that's less fun.

Restrictive scripting and programming languages are much safer in that regard and exist for a reason.

On top of that, until bitcoin confirmation speeds can improve, I dont think it would be wise to have dapps just yet. Maybe stuff for things like escrow, and other things that a smart contract could make use of, but in terms of tokens (as we see on with eth), probably wont be wise.

Bitcoin ALREADY has opportunity to create smart contracts. BUT: Bitcoin uses Script programming language which is not  Turing complete, so it is very hard to code something on it. Ethereum has high level programming languages like Solidity, Serpent (As i know Serpent will be replaced by Viper in near future) and it's very easy to create smart contracts on it.

But you can use any bitcoin framework (for languages like Python or C++ ) and try to create something which will be more or less looks like a smart contract.

The various "Colored coins" projects were attempting to create a robust smart contract framework for Bitcoin, but because of the difficulty and/or dissatisfaction with their efforts, the Ethereum project was born. Smart contracts may be able to be rooted in Bitcoin but operated through a secondary layer, but robust, pure on-chain smart contracts are not really possible right now in Bitcoin.

Read OP and the first reply again. There's work being done on bringing smart contracts to Bitcoin via sidechains (ie. RSK) and other approaches. Their viability still remains to be seen however, as earlier attempts at bringing smart contracts to Bitcoin received only luke-warm reception so far once the initial hype subsided -- XCP and Omni (FKA Mastercoin) come to mind.

Yes, it's true. But whether bitcoin can make a smart contract? I don't think so. Ethereum this is a smart contract.. not Bitcoin

Very True .. and most upcoming Dapps will ditch Eth for bitcoin

If bitcoin introduces the smart contracts then I think the value of Etherium might dip. Etherium was solely built because bitcoin did not have smart contracts.

I checked his Twitter and since June when he released the whitepaper, he didn't really talk more about it. Now, I don't know which one is best from a technical point of view but Rootstock (Rsk.co) which is another project to bring smart contracts to Bitcoin managed to raise 3.5MM and they are currently in Beta phase so It's unlikely to see his project coming alive anytime soon as his GitHub doesn't contain anything.

According to this: https://www.coindesk.com/smart-contracts-bitcoin-lightnings-tadge-dryja-working/ article, smart contract like feature might happen on bitcoin, wouldn't that be great? what is your view on that?