“Mindblowing” yet impractical: Eric Wall’s perspective on BitVM
Bitcoin developer Eric Wall has described the recent BitVM research paper as both “mindblowing” yet ultimately a “technological dead end” for Bitcoin smart contracts. 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. 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 impractical , 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. You might also like: Binance’s CZ expects Bitcoin to hit new all-time high in 2025 However, Wall al...