[cocktailpeanuts]

This is basically a bespoke blockchain that uses BTC as oracle. It's not a smart contracts "on Bitcoin". By this logic, I could write an ERC20 token on ETH and use some BTC state, and call it "smart contracts on Bitcoin".

[muneeb]

Muneeb here, Stacks co-founder. So it does not use Bitcoin as oracle. It uses Bitcoin as a settlement layer. (Oracles like Chainlink can be, and are being, built using Clarity lang for Stacks blockchain itself.)

For using Bitcoin state on Ethereum, you'll need to implement Bitcoin SPV proofs. It's entirely possible but fairly complicated to do that given (a) Ethereum is a separate network that can fork independently from Bitcoin (Clarity contracts on Stacks fork with Bitcoin), and (b) Eth miners have no native visibility into Bitcoin state (Stacks miners have full visibility into Bitcoin state). Possible but more complicated. Further, any asset generation and transfers etc on such ERC20 asset would have nothing to with Bitcoin vs on Stacks all asset generation and transfers etc settle on Bitcoin and are secured by the Bitcoin main blockchain.

[cocktailpeanuts]

People are asking you why this counts as "on Bitcoin", and you've been saying throughout this thread it's because it has access to the Bitcoin ledger data. My point is that it pretty much sounds like you're using BTC as an "oracle" (and of course, you're using BTC as settlement, but that's a given, and also doesn't qualify as being "on bitcoin"). Stacks is a separate ledger that pegs itself to Bitcoin, not "on". "Smart contracts on Bitcoin" would be something that's entirely built on the Bitcoin ledger and every smart contract transaction is a Bitcoin transaction that settles.

[muneeb]

What you are describing is similar to what Stacks 1.0 was i.e., directly on top of the Bitcoin chain -- a virtualchain. Every Stacks 1.0 transaction was a Bitcoin transaction.

The lessons we learned from that deployment for 2+ years is that (a) it doesn't scale that well and (b) it's very hard to modify Bitcoin and get new changes accepted (for good reason), so you end up with very limited scripting.

To fix the two limitations of Stacks 1.0, we worked on Stacks 2.0 which has a separate blockchain (so scalability independent of Bitcoin) where settlements still happen on Bitcoin and, more importantly, a full smart contract language without modifying Bitcoin itself: https://clarity-lang.org

[hanniabu]

You pretty much just explained why they're right and how it's not built in bitcoin.

Definitely not a fan how you're trying to bend reality for marketing benefits.

[cft]

When I read "Smart contacts on Bitcoin", I though you have somehow encoded smart contract logic in a novel Bitcoin output script, and that this contract script is thus executed by the Bitcoin miners. If you just use the Bitcoin output scripts to store some data, I would make a better name for your product.

[dchuk]

(No disrespect to your project) I’m a technical person, built lots of software myself over the years, run a large product team now...and I have absolutely no idea how to parse almost anything you said here. May as well be in Greek, the density of buzzwords is wild.

Everything in cryptocurrency is so obtuse and unapproachable for even otherwise-technical people, it’s pretty incredible given it’s been around over a decade now.

[Kranar]

I mean if you spent decades running a large product team that develops accounting web apps, would you expect to be able to read and interpret a description of product related to bio-informatics, or neurotechnology?

If you spent decades working on video game graphics, would it surprise you that someone describing algorithms for sophisticated quantitative finance or high frequency trading use terminology you're not familiar with, including an abundance of words literally borrowed from the Greek language?

Information technology is an absolutely massive field that is finding more and more use cases every year, it shouldn't be a surprise that there are areas of it that you're not familiar with and would need to devote a substantial amount of time to become well versed.

As someone who has spent a decent amount of time understanding cryptocurrencies, it's not really all that much different from learning any other field. You can start with some Youtube videos, read a few blog posts, heck you can even spend a couple of weekends writing your first smart contract and deploy it to Ethereum to see how it works. My first side project on Ethereum was writing a decentralized poker game, I wrote a series of smart contracts based on the theory of Mental Poker [1] and deployed it to the test net, and then wrote a web front end for it that waited for a new block to get published, parsed it and displayed it. It was pretty cool, once you deploy your smart contract to the blockchain, it's kind of magical seeing a completely decentralized system of computers bring that code to life. Like once you deploy your code, that's it, it's entirely out of your hands from that point forward and there's this engine that takes it and keeps it chugging literally for as long as there are miners willing to operate the Ethereum network.

Everything is a mystery until you take the time to learn it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker

[tomc1985]

I don't know if that argument works for finance on a moral level, where vocabulary has historically been abused to confuse and bamboozle

[wmf]

I sort of understand what's being said in this thread and I wouldn't say it's deliberately obtuse. A lot of ideas have been invented over the last decade and it's good that precise terminology exists to describe it. If you want to get into the minutiae of blockchain there's no shortcut.

And isn't it a two-way pegged sidechain?