Subject: [bitcoin-dev] BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin

From: Robin Linus <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2023 15:46:24 +0200

Abstract. BitVM is a computing paradigm to express Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts. This requires no changes to the network’s consensus rules. Rather than executing computations on Bitcoin, they are merely verified, similarly to optimistic rollups. A prover makes a claim that a given function evaluates for some particular inputs to some specific output. If that claim is false, then the verifier can perform a succinct fraud proof and punish the prover. Using this mechanism, any computable function can be verified on Bitcoin. Committing to a large program in a Taproot address requires significant amounts of off-chain computation and communication, however the resulting on-chain footprint is minimal. As long as both parties collaborate, they can perform arbitrarily complex, stateful off-chain computation, without leaving any trace in the chain. On-chain execution is required only in case of a dispute.

https://bitvm.org/bitvm.pdf