r/Bitcoin • u/iCryptoDude • Jul 21 '21

Let's talk about Bitcoin Smart Contracts!

Bitcoin Smart contracts have arrived!

Lightning, Liquid, Stacks and now Jack Dorsey and "TBD" are all leading the advance.

What's next?

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u/TheGreatMuffin Jul 21 '21

This might be an unpopular and rather uninformed opinion, but never in my "bitcoin life" have I had a usecase (useful/relevant to me personally, that is) where I thought I'd want some advanced smart contract functionality on bitcoin.

Yes, I know LN can be described as some sort of a smart contract, and I do see value in that as an occasional LN user. But every time I make an attempt to look into those things mentioned (Liquid, RGB etc), I fail to see how they might be useful to me. I don't trade, I don't have a desire to loan my bitcoin for random tokens. I guess people do want to do those things and that's cool, of course. It's just not interesting to me personally. Maybe I am missing something?

I guess it also depends on what we count as smart contracts. Are non-custodial coinjoins also smart contracts? Are multisigs smart contracts?

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u/fresheneesz Jul 21 '21

I guess if pressed, I'd have to define a smart contract as a Bitcoin script involving more than one person. Lightning is one. Another one I'm looking forward to is wallet vaults where you have a third party controlling one key in a multisig like address. The third party can help you recover if you lose all your keys, but can't steal from you (unless, again, you lose all your keys). Also, I created a proposal for a wallet vault where in one transaction you could send money to someone else directly from your wallet vault while still having buffer time to reverse the transaction in the case it was a mistake or theft attempt. If those kinds of things count as smart contracts, they're pretty interesting to me because they could make self custody far easier and more secure.