Bitcoin Forum

We all know what BTC, BCC, and ETH are. But new to the reader may be symbol WBTC – short for “wrapped Bitcoin,” which will essentially be a token on the Ethereum blockchain tied directly to the value of Bitcoin. A combined effort of Kyber Network, Republic Protocol and BitGo, the token will have two important effects on cryptocurrency.

First, it will enable Bitcoin to participate in Ethereum smart contracts natively on the Ethereum blockchain. While multiple efforts to initiate smart contracts on Bitcoin’s own chain have historically been undertaken, including QTUM, which runs the Ethereum Virtual Machine on the Bitcoin network, and Rootstock, which mirrors the features of Ethereum for Bitcoin, Ethereum remains the dominant mode in terms of smart contracts. Nevertheless, the prospects of Ethereum decentralized applications have been called into question recently.

Second, it will enable the value of Bitcoin to directly impact a token on the Ethereum blockchain. The tokens will be backed by the reserves of BitGo and the other participants in the project, and transparent inititatives are in progress to ensure that investors are clear about what they are holding. Accordingly, if one holds 1 WBTC, one has the equivalent value of 1 BTC.

Source: https://www.ccn.com/bitcoin-on-the-ethereum-blockchain-welcome-to-2019/amp/

Is this for real?

the idea seems interesting to me, wrapping BTC on ETH Blockchain, lets see how it starts.

of course it is real. it is an altcoin abusing the name of bitcoin. it is that real!
it has nothing to do with bitcoin though. they are making claims that they won't be able to deliver and pretty soon it will be cleared as the dumpers come in and start dumping it

The article was TL;DR;, but as always, i'm very sceptic when it comes to projects like this.

As Red-Apple already said: it's basically a private company that released a token on the ETH chain and is abusing the bitcoin name in order to gain popularity. They claim to have 1 BTC for every 1 WBTC they sell, however, i'm having a lot of questions:

• Who will check they hold 1 BTC for every 1 WBTC they sell
• After a quick browse on bitgo's website, it seems they are a custodian, a wallet service and a processor... In other words: the BTC they hold isn't THEIR BTC, it's their customer's... How much of this BTC is their property?
• So, in reality, let's say they hold 5000 BTC for their clients, and issue 5000 WBTC and sell those 5000 WBTC, they basically just doubled "their" money, right?
• What if one of their clients withdraws (for example) 1000 BTC... Will they actively buy back 1000 WBTC? Or will they just say: "i was holding 1000 BTC for my clients, so i sold 1000 WBTC for 1000 BTC, now i have 1000 BTC for myself and i'm still holding 1000 BTC for my clients... So, if my client asks his 1000 BTC back, i still have 1000 BTC in profit"

It's in order to provide liquidity for BTC on Ethereum Solidity based token DEX's, whilst baring a sense of decentralisation. If you ask me it's the wrong way to go about to provide access for the asset, as there is other methods one could take whilst still implement a variation of the smart contract technology.

If you want an example of this theory in a real use case look at WETH, it's been alive for quite some time.

no one cares today what created the first internet browser, plane etc.

market moves on

Anything that has bitcoin in it is never to be taken lightly. BCC was ignored by many when it was muted as a result of the fork. Now, BCC is waxing really strong. So it will be for this WBTC. It is good to take advantage of. 

This will enable a few things that otherwise would not have been possible before, I suspect the largest use will be in terms of trading BTC/ALT pairs on decentralized exchanges by use of this token. In that regard it will be quite novel and useful, in most other regards it seems a little bit pointless as cross-chain compatibility isn't an issue for a lot of people's uses. As for if they'll actually have it backed up and being transparent this shouldn't be hard to do, they should be able to provide a contract address for WBTC showing how much is issued and a subsequent bitcoin address that shows the btc holdings. At least I'd hope they'd do something like that to ensure confidence.

This is the same concept as stablecoins but with BTC instead of USD, and it has the same problems, people will be using just a token, not bitcoin, and they will have to trust in a company's word.

All of these backed coins present the same issues, they're another layer of centralization and trust. Even if the coin is backed 1-1 and that can be proved there's nothing stopping the company from rejecting requests to revert WBTC to BTC if there's too many people demanding it at once due to some sort of vulnerability in WBTC etc, it will be set up in some way to ensure limited liability.

As long as they have the btc and prove it then it shouldn't be an issue. They should be able to have something in terms of a contractual agreement that ensures people will be paid their BTC even if there are issues. At the end of the day the BTC they hold belongs to others rather than to them because they've used the funds they received from wrapped BTC sales to buy it.

This is an interesting way to address the issue Bitcoin had with it's fixed block weight limit. But there are issues I'd wonder how they would be dealt with such as, is there enough BTC to back WBTC  and also the fact it is KNC it isn't technically fungible. There are simpler alternatives to address the issue but, who knows? maybe this'll turn out to be something good. We'll just have to wait and see for ourselves.

The same way the money you deposit in a bank is technically yours but they still have found a way multiple times in the past to get away without paying out on peoples deposits when they've hit hard times. At least in a bank your funds are often protected by governments but not with crypto.

This is not interesting at all, i have seen this before for example eBTC and many others.
what they wanted to do is creating a project that could pump ETH price or the project itself by using Bitcoin name, while it was pure bullshit.
it is all about hype and the brand itself,
logically speaking if it is tied with Bitcoin in term of price while it uses ETH network as its base, does not that mean ETH's price should have a relation with it ? because it is working on ETH network.

This is technically quite interesting, yet I am not that sure of how good is this in terms of the market. What I mean, is that this seems to solve a problem that nobody has now.

But this isn't a bank, there is nothing to suggest they wouldn't pay out. Will the founders receive a portion of the total minted coins or how else will they profit from this? That's the only concern I have

As far as I understand, this will basically act as a stable coin backed by Bitcoin. There are these cryptocurrency collateral stable coins instead of USD. So probably WBTC is also going in that direction. Other than that it can also help embedding Bitcoins in smart contracts. That's something very innovative. But the first thing that we need to see is if WBTC devs have enough Bitcoins for this and how secure are they.

I have been thinking about this some more the last few days and the possibilities it now gives, do you think we might see WBTC being used for ICOs instead of ETH now that it can be used on the ETH blockchain to deploy smart contracts?

just another crypto wants the hype by using the name of bitcoin.. All of this drama like mirroring the feature of ethereum blockchain is useless.. ethereum blockchian is enough to do its job just improve its scalability

Both Ethereum and bitcoin are the most promising cryptocurrencies on the market. I think that they will show what they are capable of and we will be surprised by the results. But now I put them on the same level

It makes no sense to choose. For me as viction AK and Ethereum are of great importance and I think they can give me a big salary anyway. So they're more like colleagues, not enemies

The idea is good but it is just also a common token. Unless it is the for for bitcoin, then we can assume that it is from bitcoin itself. We can easily make a similar bitcoin to other platform. But the bitcoin platform has a unique feature that cannot be copied.