Who Will Pay for Turing-Complete Smart Contracts?
Lost in our 'pie-in-the-sky' projections on the future of blockchains is the most important concern anyone should have on the technology: What are the opportunity costs? Nowhere is that more pronounced in the current debates then in the case of the "smart contract". While I believe that smart contracts will provide a number of efficiencies in our blockchain future, there's one category of smart contracts that I'm most skeptical of – that of the recently popular "Turing complete" smart contract. All smart contract platforms in use today fall into roughly two broad....
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Although smart contract projects on alternative blockchains such as Ethereum are gaining a lot of attention, smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain itself are challenging because the Bitcoin network is not a “Turing Complete” system. A Turing Complete system is one that can compute any algorithmically computable function (although with no guarantees regarding runtime or memory). The Bitcoin network has purposefully omitted Turing completeness to allow the economic incentives the network has been able to create, and for minimizing the security risks that come with self-executable....
The turing complete token Ethereum has been making strides towards the top spot in cryptocurrency capitalizations. This week the digital currency has bumped Litecoin out of the third position on the coinmarketcap.com list hitting a cap of over $138 million USD. The past few months have been active for Ethereum, who has seen development, investment and positive media within its crypto-environment. The built-in turing-complete programming language as a layer configured into the ETH blockchain has intrigued developers and investors. This system is said to enable businesses and ordinary people....
A new blog post has come out explaining the essence of Rootstock, a Turing complete platform that will utilize the Bitcoin Blockchain for its operations. The post details this protocol will allow smart contracts and enable methods of exchange similar to the Ethereum project. Developers can use its side chain technology to implement this programmable system to the original permissionless digital ledger. The Medium statement reads: The Rootstock (RSK) side chain will operate as its own platform but allow interoperability between both blockchains. Developers of RSK believe this keeps....
In November of 2014, Counterparty Contracts was launched, which let users write Turing Complete smart contracts into the Bitcoin blockchain, with the code being executed on every Counterparty node. This initiative - a port of the Ethereum Virtual machine code and modified to use the Bitcoin blockchain - was open sourced on GitHub and available for public testing on the Counterparty testnet for over a year. For quite some time now, developers and digital currency enthusiasts have been looking for a way to run smart contract technology on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Although this service....
Counterparty announced that its developers have successfully ported the Ethereum Project's programming language over to the Counterparty platform, enabling users to save and execute Turing Complete Ethereum code on the Bitcoin blockchain. With this new development, Counterparty makes it possible to execute Ethereum smart contracts on the more secure Bitcoin blockchain. Also read: Gavin Andresen Outlines Bitcoin 2.0 Without Ethereum. Counterparty is a Bitcoin 2.0 and cryptosecurities technology platform. In the Counterparty protocol traditional financial instruments are implemented as....