Bitcoin Forum

It seems like everything is all about smart contracts nowadays. Are there things we cannot do or replace with smart contracts? Or is it just performance/size limitations of the blockchain that is limiting smart contract's growth and potential?

Apparently Rootstock not only allows to port ALL of the Ethereum apps into the bitcoin ecosystem as a sidechain, but it also bumps the transaction capacity to 100 transactions per second, so yes, this is pretty huge.

Of course, we haven't seen a single line of code, so let's see if they can deliver on their promises.

The growth in smart contracts will be gradual. At first, simple contracts will become smart. Once the stability of smart contracts is established, then people will consider using smart contracts for complicated problems.

People are going to be skeptical of smart contracts for a long, long time, after the DAO debacle confirmed that it is indeed a good idea to be skeptic about them.

First we got to get the money part perfected, then we should worry about smart contracts later.

Rootstock is superior to Ethereum because it isolates the entire smart contract infrastructure from the main blockchain, and it makes sense.

Native turing completeness, as pointed out by reputable experts, is just a bad idea, so isolation via a sidechain seems like the optimal setup.

Im more interested in the improvement on transactions per second above all else tho, like I said, let's focus on that before we go for more complex stuff.

We don't know. For now, smart contracts are pretty limited to financial applications and maybe record keeping, and even then, some are really hard to implement (e.g. insurance) because it's difficult to avoid them of being gamed. For me, the most interesting use case are CFDs because they would enable "stable assets", although there is the well known oracle problem (it requires a trusted third party to import information from external sources, like a price feed).

Many real-world applications like the "smart taxi example" brought up by some smart contract supporters (a virtual taxi business with self-driving cars) would require a high degree of surveillance (e.g. by Internet of Things objects) to avoid being gamed in some way. So I don't know if I really want a world governed by smart contracts if I must sacrifice my privacy for it.


Well, they have released Turmeric (https://news.bitcoin.com/rootstock-launches-new-testnet-turmeric/), and they have also a Github repo (https://github.com/rootstock). But the final version seems not to be available.

The biggest limitation of the smart contract is the isolation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (you don't have direct access to the Internet, hard drives, etc). Second limitation - your budget. You can do a lot with smart contracts, but you should pay for every calculation, so be careful with your spendings!