Bitcoin ecology is a particularly controversial ecosystem. On the one hand, new things can indeed be speculated on, but on the other hand, many things cannot withstand technical scrutiny and the test of time. Lao Bai, a partner at ABCDE Investment Research, summarized the current and future directions of exploration in the Bitcoin ecosystem, as well as the new applications of Bitcoin that he has seen, and stated that Bitcoin does need to find a direction to make use of its 3M witness space.
Current exploration directions: 1) Pure sidechain: BlockSteam’s Liquid Network, mainly for large-scale Bitcoin transfers and transaction settlements for institutions; 2) State channels: Lightning Network, currently with average data, locking around 5,000 BTC in channels of around 70,000; 3) Indirect sidechain: RSK and Stacks, both of which do not truly inherit the security or hash power of BTC, but only look somewhat similar, completely different from ETH L2; 4) Client validation: RGB and Taro, a relatively new paradigm, but development is slow and has been overtaken by Ordinal; 5) Ordinal: actually stuffing things into the 3M witness data in Segwit.
Future directions: 1) NFTs: Does it really make more sense to put small pictures in the 3M segregated witness space than on AR or IPFS? It’s a bit far-fetched; 2) BRC20/ORC20/SRC20/BRCXXX: BRC20 has many limitations and is inconvenient, but the XRCs with stronger functionality are becoming more like ERCs, and BTC can never be more user-friendly than ETH and other smart contract-based public chains; 3) DA: Celestia Rollkit is working on this, but the problem is that it is not superior in terms of speed or capacity.
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Several new BTC applications seen currently: 1) Timestamp server: Cosmos ecosystem Babylon is doing this by using BTC as a timestamp server to help POS chains prevent long-range attacks, “borrowing” the security of Bitcoin to serve some POS chains; 2) DA: Celestia Rollkit is doing this; 3) EVM compatibility/equivalence: RSK is also EVM compatible, but hasn’t done much about it. Some new projects in the primary market are exploring this direction; 4) Zk+BTC: ZeroSync is doing this, with a Public Good style. Using ZK-STARK to generate ZK proofs for the Bitcoin network, it can currently prove block headers and transaction data, while signature information proof is still under development.
Reference: https://twitter.com/Wuhuoqiu/status/1664121960866119680
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