The emergence of Bitcoin (BTC) Ordinals marks an “organic return to builder culture,” according to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Buterin made the above comments on Twitter on July 7 space He discusses at length what Bitcoin developers can learn from Ethereum developers with Bitcoin proponents Eric Wall and Udi Wertheimer.
Buterin praised Ordinals and the BRC-20 token standard, which he sees as a rejection of the politics of “stagnation” in the bitcoin ecosystem.
“The serial number is starting to bring back a culture of actually doing things. It feels like Retinoid movement is really hindered, which is good,” Buterin said.
OK, let’s try again! @VitalikButerin https://t.co/RsEag1VAKr
— Udi Wertheimer (@udiWertheimer) July 6, 2023
The nearly two-hour conversation revolved around scalability issues. Wall claimed that Bitcoin’s Lightning Network does not scale for future users and fails “often” when processing “even moderately sized payments.”
In this regard, Buterin suggested that the best approach is to focus on implementing different types of Layer-2 solutions and finding ways to make the Bitcoin base layer more efficient.
“I think it’s good to focus on rollups, so it’s also good to be open to scaling solutions based on ZK-snark.”
Wertheimer thinks that introducing zero-knowledge rollups could have interesting side effects.
“If we take bitcoin rollups, we actually also get an execution environment (…) where we can execute smart contracts,” Wertheimer said.
Wall and Wertheimer — two key figures behind the Ordinals project Taproot Wizards — are outspoken advocates for Ordinals and have often advocated for more functionality to be built on top of the Bitcoin network.
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Their stance has drawn criticism from more fundamentalist bitcoin supporters, who claim that bitcoin’s NFTs and smart contracts undermine bitcoin’s primary function as a peer-to-peer cash network.
Those critics included Jan3 CEO Samson Mow, who argued that Ordinals wasted block space that could have been dedicated to bitcoin payments.
Wall took note of these criticisms, explaining that Bitcoin can be used as a “proof system” for zero-knowledge proofs, which don’t cause network congestion.
“My point is that we (bitcoin enthusiasts) have always wanted to do DeFi-related things, but we just want the bitcoin base layer to act as the judge or arbiter of that computation without having to run the computation on-chain,” Wall said .
“We don’t necessarily think of layer two as just a payment method, but I think we can also think of them (as a way of doing things) as expressive things.”
The discussion sparked fresh controversy in the bitcoin community, with Wertheimer slamming Mow and Blockstream CEO Adam Beck for dismissing the conversation with Buterin.
These Two Retinoid Clowns Have Been Running Blockstream Underground for the Last Decade
For a decade, the company failed to launch a single successful product
They joke that the blockchain processes 3 transactions a day
They think they have nothing to learn from Ethereum pic.twitter.com/mp7we9Lvxq
— Udi Wertheimer (@udiWertheimer) July 6, 2023
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