In this video we explain lightclient security and its importance for scaling #bitcoin. This took place at event "Bitcoin’s Orbit" in HK during #BitcoinAsia2024

https://t.co/8BahdWOCa2

Leading researcher team @zellic_io said: “Jag gave one of the best panels I've seen. He is clearly a founder who deeply understands the important security and design considerations of $BTC roll ups.”

Insights below!

We were joined by 4 distinguished guests at our Bitcoin’s Orbit event in Hong Kong including Jagdeep Sidhu (@realSidhuJag), Founder of @RolluxL2, Dominik Harz (@dominik0_), Co-Founder of @build_on_bob, Kevin He (@0xkevinhe), Co-Founder of @BitlayerLabs and Tugce Smith(@tugcesmith), Marketing lead at @Citrea_xyz. We covered the very important and relevant topic of scaling Bitcoin through sidechains and light client security.

We open up @realSidhuJag explaining the thesis of the 4 layers of the @syscoin tech stack and how they are important. #BitcoinLayer2 systems will create new attacks never seen on Bitcoin before and we shouldn’t take them lightly. There has been no academic work in the space around it. Now we are creating a foundational paper to create a framework of security for the industry so technical assumptions can be equally compared across solutions. Light-client security for layer 2 @bitcoin solutions is the biggest concern and not enough of the solutions are talking about it.

The main points made and agreed by all participants began with Dominik's re-enforcement of the point around standardizing around EVM and solidity and that generally web3 programming and usability is much higher and the rest of the space has catching up to do to compete. @0xkevinhe rightfully pointed out the decentralized cost model of Zero-Knowledge proofs and that almost everything can be done with Zero-knowledge proofs and that is the end-game for blockchains. @tugcesmith explaining that using Bitcoin as a settlement and DA layer comes with pro’s and con’s and @Citrea_xyz chose to use Bitcoin directly given those tradeoffs.

Both Dominik and Jag agreed on using #mergedmining as a core principle when building side chains. @build_on_bob uses it for sealing #BitcoinL2 state transitions and Jag explains how #Rollux uses it directly for DA/Ordering of the settlement.

Here is where it gets interesting! Jag Sidhu makes a unique insight that trying to scale via UTXO on Bitcoin through zk rollups or using UTXO directly will end up back to an EVM side-chain design because you cannot easily produce UTXO based solutions for things like AMM based Decentralized exchange ie: #Uniswap. There are tradeoffs that are made by using OP_CAT based introspections right on Bitcoin but you will not be able to do everything an EVM can and there for there will always be a need for an EVM side-chain.

The other realization was that all solutions that create a $BTC representation in their own consensus (even those that settle on Bitcoin directly and use #BitcoinDA) will end up always resolving down to a light-client security assumption and our research focused on minimizing the trust assumptions, making attacks detectable and allow honest users to front-run attacks and therefor creating a maximal Nash equilibrium to avoid attack incentives.

Decentralizing operator lists in BitVM were also covered with a new ideations around crypto-economic incentives through an Eigen type AVS service with Bitcoin used as collateral to make any $BTC holder able to become an operator to profit from the bridge but also add critical security and trustlessness to it.