Author: Mu Mu, Plain Language Blockchain
In the past year, the Bitcoin ecosystem has developed rapidly. Many people were suddenly enlightened when they heard that the Bitcoin ecosystem also had "smart contracts": "If Bitcoin, which has an invincible consensus and a stronger network, has smart contracts, then there will be no need for public chains such as Ethereum and Solana?" This view is quite widespread and has been supported by many novices and even some financial KOLs, but is it really so?
01 Bitcoin Supremacy
"There are only two kinds of coins in the world, one is Bitcoin and the other is altcoins." Bitcoin Supremacists have always maintained this view for many years. On the one hand, Bitcoin Supremacists are satisfied with their views, on the other hand, opponents sneer at them and often use them as a satire.
In fact, the reason for such a stubborn view is that Bitcoin has never disappointed people since its birth. Bitcoin has returned to the throne in rounds of bear and bull cycles. It seems to have become a repeatedly verified fact, which makes people have to be convinced and has a firm belief that the direction of Bitcoin is always right.
In this case, if Bitcoin is as strong as it has its own smart contract, it can directly deploy DAPP. Why is Ethereum needed? There is no Solana! This logic seems to make perfect sense.
Some people object that Ethereum and Solana represent generations of technological innovation and should embrace innovation.But the biggest Bitcoiners have enough reasons to refute: "Innovation also has a price and is prone to failure."
02 It's not that Bitcoin is right, but its direction is right
Most of the biggest Bitcoiners seem to have nothing wrong with rejecting innovative projects such as Ethereum and Solana, but they seem to have missed a very important point, that is, Bitcoin was also an innovation compared to traditional financial projects and even some similar electronic currency projects launched earlier.Isn't it because they embraced this innovation that most of the biggest Bitcoiners were able to benefit from Bitcoin?
Why are they now conservative and unwilling to embrace innovation when they could have embraced it? Perhaps they have a mentality of stopping when they see the good. It has not been easy to HODL for so many years. They have finally survived until now and don't want to be taken away by some high-risk innovations. After all, they have seen too many star projects that collapsed overnight, so they have become cautious.
As mentioned earlier, Bitcoin was not the only electronic currency innovation of that era. At that time, many institutions, organizations, and even some illegal organizations proposed similar concepts, and some of them were referenced by Satoshi Nakamoto when he designed Bitcoin. To this day, there are project parties who will say: "I can do what Bitcoin can do, and I can do what Bitcoin cannot do", but in fact, it is useless.
So has anyone ever thought about why only simple Bitcoin has emerged from these projects and developed sustainably? The same question is also useful when applied to Ethereum and Solana. Why can these innovative projects come out and be sustainable?
The reason why Bitcoin has been widely recognized is mainly because its core concept and direction itself grasp the key points and the rigid needs of the times, and use incentive mechanisms to allow humans to participate in large-scale collaboration in an open manner, bringing a bottom-up decentralized, free, fair, and transparent value storage platform. This is also the original intention of the encryption project.
Among so many projects now, not all of them keep the original intention of Crypto. Some are purely innovative concepts customized for VC and investors' FOMO psychology packaging. They will PUA, saying that sacrificing a little decentralization can be exchanged for high efficiency and greater value. After all, making money is the bottom line, which hits the hearts of many people.
The current phenomenon is that when people hear that the public chain has a big cake and high valuation, a group of people will gather to do public chains, because this can attract higher investments, be more imaginative, and allow users to pay more money. So don't ask why it is obviously a valuable project, but it just can't get started? The fundamental reason is that the direction is wrong, because for projects with the purpose of profit, most of the revenue objects are ultimately users, and the wool can only come from the sheep.
The reason why Crypto exists is not because of high performance and efficiency or other alternative performance, but because of the decentralization, freedom, fairness and transparency it brings, and the applications that really have Web3 needs and landing value. We should pay more attention to those applications that cannot solve the problems of Web2 and the real rigid demand value behind them.
As mentioned in the previous article "Is the Bitcoin bull market, the most difficult to make money in history, about to end? ": In any industry, anyone who does not pursue the correct values of the industry, does not recognize the value of the industry, and enters with the mentality of "cutting leeks" is destined to fail in this career. Even if they taste the sweetness at the beginning, they will soon be eaten back by the market. Many people have forgotten the original intention of Bitcoin and the encryption industry, and the final result of distorted values may be serious misjudgment.
With this simplest method, you can actually distinguish 90% of the "unscrupulous" projects on the market.
03 Ethereum and Solana can still live well with the development of Bitcoin ecosystem
1) Diversified demand
Before Ethereum and Solana, Bitcoin was not alone. There were also a large number of active early altcoins around. This was determined by the diversified needs of the market. Of course, each project has its own value. We can at least divide these projects into three categories:
Digital gold
There is only one project that can be called digital gold, Bitcoin. Under the global environment, the rigid demand for digital gold has long been beyond words.
Durable goods
Ethereum and some sustainable development DeFi and other Web3 infrastructure and applications have solved problems that Web2 cannot solve. When EVM becomes the standard configuration of most smart contract public chains on the market, Ethereum has become an indispensable part of Web3. Such projects have long-term value, that is, durable goods.
Fast Moving Consumer Goods
Meme allows emotional value to be stored, but many emotions, including some new concepts, come and go quickly, just like a piece of paper, which has a certain life cycle. It is not expected to be used repeatedly, nor can it be expected to provide value in the long term.
The first two can be used as medium- and long-term targets, while the latter can only be used once, otherwise it is easy to get stuck and unable to get out.
2) Technological Innovation
It is not the first time that the Bitcoin ecosystem has been proposed to introduce smart contracts. There have been many attempts in the early days of Bitcoin (such as colored coins), and the exploration has continued to this day.
There were many technical bottlenecks in the early days. At that time, it was almost impossible for Bitcoin to directly introduce powerful smart contracts without abandoning the original technical route. After all, if the code and route were to be "changed overnight", the developers would have long since scattered, and it would be impossible to have today's strong consensus.
Originally, Vitalik proposed the idea of introducing smart contracts in the Bitcoin community, but due to opposition from the Bitcoin core, Vitalik decided to start a new business, and later Ethereum was born.
In recent years, Bitcoin has maintained a stable technical route, while Ethereum has brought many innovations, such as smart contracts, POS, EIP1559, etc., especially Rollup Layer2, which solves the scalability problem.
In the current Bitcoin ecosystem, except for some innovations in Lightning Network and Stacks, most of them directly use Ethereum's Rollup technical solutions. Has anyone thought about whether this is really applicable?
Take ZK-Rollup as an example. It was originally designed as a Layer2 solution for smart contract platforms such as Ethereum. After Zk-Rollup calculates zero-knowledge proofs off-chain, it is submitted to the Ethereum chain for direct verification and settlement. However, Bitcoin itself cannot directly verify zero-knowledge proofs. Some project parties have tried to add another layer of middleware, such as an oracle, to force this process through. However, this behavior is tantamount to sticking a bull's horn to a horse's head with tape to forcibly transform it into a "unicorn".
04 Bitcoin itself does not support smart contracts
Bitcoin smart contracts are currently just a slogan for related ecological projects. The smart contracts here are all implemented through ecological projects. Bitcoin itself does not support smart contracts, and it is highly likely that it will not be upgraded to support them in the future. Because "you can't have your cake and eat it too", if you want to be pure digital gold, you can't have smart contracts.
First, the UTXO data structure itself cannot achieve a state as complex as the Ethereum account model; secondly, as a smart contract platform, while the ecosystem is developing, inflation is constantly reduced, which makes BTC, which is used as a handling fee, more and more expensive. As a result, the high cost will inhibit the development of the ecosystem.
As mentioned above, Bitcoin smart contracts refer to Bitcoin ecosystem project smart contracts, but the security, reliability and even scalability of smart contract projects implemented through layering are not as good as the Ethereum ecosystem.The Ethereum ecosystem has always been the largest "export" destination for Bitcoin. WBTC, tBTC and Coinbase's cbBTC are entering the Ethereum ecosystem in different forms to participate in DeFi.From the perspective of layering, Ethereum is already the largest and most widely used side chain of Bitcoin.In fact, the innovation of the Ethereum ecosystem, including scalability, interoperability, and account abstraction, has long been at the forefront of the industry, and a number of Bitcoin ecosystem projects that "copy homework" can only follow behind.
05 Summary
As long as the Bitcoin ecosystem, Ethereum ecosystem, Solana ecosystem and more and more innovations in the future maintain the original intention of Crypto and create real value around the values of Web3, they all have the rationality of their existence. You take the sunny road, I take the single-plank bridge, and we all have a bright future.
JinseFinance
Cointelegraph
Nulltx