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?

Interesting. Is there any link to a discussion? I have not found anything on Google, at least regarding DLCs. Perhaps older smart contract ideas like Counterparty (which abandoned its smart contract develpment though) maybe were discussed in those "olden coins" communities ...

From my understanding, the only feature DLCs need is some timelock for the refund transaction (if the Oracle disappears). This means either OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY (CLTV) or OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY (CSV). AFAIK the former was added in 2015 and the latter in 2016 to Bitcoin code, but there are some older coins which support these features despite being based on early (pre 0.16) Bitcoin versions and never "rebased".

I'm almost sure both timelock opcodes are supported on:

- Litecoin
- Groestlcoin
- Peercoin
- Ravencoin
- Dogecoin has CLTV since 0.14, and I have recently seen CSV has been implemented, but still not activated.

I'm not totally sure if it needs transaction malleability fixed (e.g. via Segwit) but from my understanding it doesn't need it. LTC, GRS and PPC have Segwit and Taproot enabled so if the DLC code uses some related feature it can still be ported very easy.

J-Dog, the lead dev of Dogeparty (and former maintainer of Counterparty), expressed interest in building a Virtual Machine on top of Dogecoin, but actual, real-world utility has taken a backseat to NFTs and memetokens. From what I gather (or maybe its because of who I surround myself with on Twitter), just about nobody is interested in the functionality of cryptocurrency anymore, outside of die-hard BTC, ETH and XMR maxis (present company also excluded). Its all hype-driven gambling these days. Sad but its where we find ourselves.