There were some interesting new developments for Bitcoin related to
smart contracts in the last years. One of them is Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs), which allows a simple form of a contract-for-difference on Bitcoin, without need for a Turing complete language (like Ethereum's). It only depends on a semi-trusted oracle (something all financial smart contracts which rely on a source for e.g. the BTC/USD or ETH/USD prices do) which cannot steal funds, so it's a low-risk technology.
See
this introduction to DLCs and
this article.
One of the
obstacles for the popularization of these contracts is of course the transaction fee. DLCs afaik can also be operated on Lightning. But Lightning is still not much used, and many consider it still too difficult or risky for non-technical people.
A "low hanging fruit" alternative would be to
use Litecoin or similar altcoins, i.e. those based on Bitcoin code, for DLCs. This would lower the entry barriers, you could try out the instrument with
contracts of the value of a few dollars.
But all applications I know,
Atomic Finance, Itchy Sats/10101, P2P Derivatives and so on, focus on Bitcoin. See this
Github link collection.
Wouldn't it be an interesting task for Litecoin supporters to port this technology to LTC? Of course also other "classic" Bitcoin-based coins could adapt it without much coding work, for example NMC or PPC. This would be probably much more interesting than porting stuff like Ordinals!
Another technology I would love to see on LTC is RGB. RGB is a private smart contract protocol where the protocol conditions are agreed on off-chain, and only transfers of tokens and other "state changes" happen on-chain. The same applies as for DLCs: the entry barrier on Bitcoin is quite high if you risk to pay high fees if you enter contracts for less than $100 for example. So it could also be an interesting use case for LTC and friends.
What do you think? Can smart contracts thrive on LTC? And what about even smaller coins? Do you see any unsurmountable problems?
