New Proposal Aims to Bring Smart Contracts to Bitcoin and Scale It to Millions of Transactions

New white paper by Robin Linus outlines BitVM, a way to bring Ethereum-style smart contracts to the Bitcoin network. Aims to help scale Bitcoin to millions of transactions per second.

BitVM uses tricks to work around Bitcoin's intentionally limited scripting capabilities, making it more expressive.

Allows bridging Bitcoin to more feature-rich sidechains to expand capabilities. Not as expressive as Ethereum but bridges enable similar functionality.

Linus sees main benefit as enabling high Bitcoin transaction volume for payments. Hopes for experimental use cases by end of 2022.

Relies on verifiers to ensure honesty of entities facilitating bridges between chains. Early developer version coming this week.