Are Optimistic ZK Rollups the best solution to scale bitcoin?
1296 sats \ 6 comments \ @nout 29 Feb bitcoin
I'm in a pickle.
After reading through the various docs & proposals I actually think that optimistic ZK rollups are the most promising bitcoin scaling solution that can enable more people in the world to use bitcoin trustlessly (more tx/s, less fees, it has privacy++ potential). It can also help scale Lightning quite seamlessly, so we will keep all these lightning wallets, while transactions get cheaper (imo). And these are at least theoretically possible to do "today" on Bitcoin thanks to the introduction of BitVM (almost trustless) and can get better with covenants or ideally ZK primitives as OP codes.
The issues is that as soon as the teams launch any of these solutions (there's a bunch), they will also introduce EVM (or similar VM) and that will bring this whole layer of garbage onto bitcoin. We will no longer be able to say "bitcoin, not crypto", because crypto garbage will run on top of bitcoin. And this is consequently making all these VCs really ecstatic to throw money here to create either scams or scam factories (I already complained about this), which will hurt the people that need hurting the least.
Can we do optimistic ZK rollups solution on bitcoin that does fast, cheap, private and trustless transactions for the world and it explicitly does not do EVM, tokens, NFTs?
@super_testnet @benthecarman @lightcoin @robin_linus would be the best folks to tell me how stupid I am...
Also, would people be interested in me writing a summary about what I understand so far about ZK rollups?
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6 sats \ 0 replies \ @hasherstacker 29 Feb
Also, would people be interested in me writing a summary about what I understand so far about ZK rollups?
Come on, let us know what you think
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1 sat \ 2 replies \ @south_korea_ln 29 Feb
Ruben Somsen has some opinion on that... https://twitter.com/SomsenRuben/status/1470846933979774980 He claims only 2x scaling factor...
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @nout OP 29 Feb
That's older info. There has been multiple improvements and breakthroughs since then. The estimates I have seen say that it could do something like 4-10x (and 40x if we use account model where privacy sucks) and then you can add more rollups on top of the first one.
One big thing that changed recently is BitVM (shared by @robin_linus in December) that could theoretically make zk rollups "almost trustless" on the current bitcoin chain without any soft fork. By "almost trustless" I mean that you can create a setup where you only need one honest actor (e.g. 1 out of 999) to prevent money being rug pulled (which is quite a difference compared to e.g. Liquid, where you need 5 of 9...)
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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln 29 Feb
Got it. 4-10x would be pretty nice already.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @lightcoin 25 Mar
I actually think that optimistic ZK rollups are the most promising bitcoin scaling solution
Rollups on their own are limited in throughput due to the block size limit on their parent chain. On bitcoin this is a theoretical max throughput of a few hundred thousand tx per 4 million WU block, which translates to about 50 tps. Compare this to Visa which does 10s of thousands of tps during peak load and you'll see we have a big gap to close. I think more likely is that rollups will work together with validia chains and payment channel networks (such as Lightning) to reach the level of scale required -- but this is not without some security tradeoffs. See also: https://lightco.in/2023/12/13/lightning-validia-rollups/
We will no longer be able to say "bitcoin, not crypto", because crypto garbage will run on top of bitcoin.
That ship sailed over a decade ago when people started building colored coins on bitcoin.
Can we do optimistic ZK rollups solution on bitcoin that does fast, cheap, private and trustless transactions for the world and it explicitly does not do EVM, tokens, NFTs?
sure, devs can design a rollup with whatever capabilities or limitations that they want. although as we've seen with inscriptions and colored coins on L1 it is probably impossible to prevent people from building embedded consensus protocols aka "metaprotocols" or "client side verification" protocols if they have some way of storing arbitrary data in transactions.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nout OP 25 Mar
While we have colored coins, these have never caught up and so I wouldn't say that the ship has sailed. Bitcoin is currently not crypto (where I'm using definition "crypto"="garbage"), but it's not as strong of a line as before because of ordinals.
Agreed that rollups provide some scale, but at most one order of magnitude and that's also hard to achieve in reality since they compete with all other stuff (and other rollups popping up now) for block space. Hearing the Citrea guys make some really bold (and naive) statements/claims doesn't fill me with confidence either.
So yeah, I think we will have to see. I'm happy to see that there are some reasonable paths to improve people's ability to transact and I'm unhappy that it will come with a wave of VC fuelled garbage.
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