What are your thoughts on ZK-rollups coming to Bitcoin?
1845 sats \ 4 comments \ @cryotosensei 17 Sep 2023 bitcoin
When someone mentions zero-knowledge proofs, people tend to think of Ethereum. However, it is important to note that ZK-proofs is a cryptographic technology and not something necessarily exclusive to Ethereum. It’s just that the concept of smart contracts encouraged developers to incorporate ZK-proofs into Ethereum.
So, recently two developer teams have been in the news for wanting to incorporate ZK-proofs into Bitcoin. Chainway wants to enable Bitcoin’s first ZK-rollup while Taproot Wizards wants to run a Starknet-based rollup.
The issue is, do you think smart contracts should be encouraged in the further development of Bitcoin in the first place? For one, there is already Stacks that has enabled smart contract and decentralised application functionality - but I doubt if this “innovation” is well-received since it involves swapping BTC for sBTC. BTC is already an integral part of our lives - does it need smart contracts?
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73 sats \ 0 replies \ @om 17 Sep 2023
it is important to note that ZK-proofs is a cryptographic technology and not something necessarily exclusive to Ethereum.
ZK-proofs, sure. Zerosync applies them to Bitcoin for great effect. ZK-rollups, though? Don't they rely on support from L1? See the Ethereum yellow paper, section E.1 "zkSNARK Related Precompiled Contracts".
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41 sats \ 0 replies \ @ama 17 Sep 2023
I wouldn't be surprised if somebody is already porting them to Solidity on RSK, which should be quite strait forward.
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @aoeu 17 Sep 2023
I think the base layer of Bitcoin shouldn't be ossified (yet) but also isn't the place to experiment. I see no issue with experimenting with ZK-proofs in bitcoin on a L2 like Liquid, though.
Bitcoin as a base layer seems to work already pretty well!
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 17 Sep 2023
I am still learning all about it lol in fairness I didn't pay much attention to them on ETH, just seemed like separate environments to put a token within a token so I dismissed the tech.
It really depends on how its implemented, Could they slap a token on it and monetise it with tokenomics, probably, if they don't how do they achieve scale and source liquidity to get people to use it? How do zk environments become more distributed? Will enough people be running it on their nodes that taking down lets say chainway won't be an issue?
I'm all for trying new things to scale BTC especially when it doesn't need changes to the base layer, but I think I'll reserve my opinion until i've tried it out.
As for smart contracts, I'm not yet sold on what they do that is sooo killer, maybe i'm missing something
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