Hi all, Today I am publishing "Validity Rollups on Bitcoin", a report I produced as part of the Human Rights Foundation's ZK-Rollup Research Fellowship.
Here's the preface: > Ever since Satoshi Nakamoto first publicly announced bitcoin, its supporters, > critics, and skeptics alike have questioned how the protocol would scale as > usage increases over time. This question is more important than ever today, > as blocks are increasingly full or close to full of transactions. So-called > "Layer 2" (L2) protocols such as the Lightning Network have been deployed to > take some transaction volume "offchain" but even Lightning needs to use > _some_ bitcoin block space. It's clear that as bitcoin is adopted by more and > more of the world's population (human and machine alike!) more block space > will be needed. Another thread of inquiry concerns whether bitcoin's limited > scripting capabilities help or hinder its value as electronic cash. > Researchers and inventors have shown that the electronic cash transactions > first made possible by bitcoin could be given new form by improving > transaction privacy, supporting new types of smart contracts, and even > creating entirely new blockchain-based assets. > > One of the results of the decade-plus research into scaling and expanding the > capabilities of blockchains such as bitcoin is the invention of the validity > rollup. Given the observed benefits that validity rollups have for the > blockchains that have already implemented them, attention now turns to the > question of whether they would be beneficial for bitcoin and existing bitcoin > L2 protocols such as Lightning, too. We explore this question by examining > validity rollups from several angles, including their history, how they work > on a technical level, how they could be built on bitcoin, and what the > benefits, costs, and risks of building them on bitcoin might be. We conclude > that validity rollups have the potential to improve the scalability, privacy, > and programmability of bitcoin without sacrificing bitcoin's core values or > functionality as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Given the "trustless" > nature of validity rollups as cryptographically-secured extensions of their > parent chain, and given bitcoin's status as the most secure settlement layer, > one could even say these protocols are a _perfect match_ for one another. You can find the full report here: https://bitcoinrollups.org Happy to receive any comments and answer any questions the bitcoin dev community may have about the report! Best regards, John Light _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
