[bitcoin-dev] Validity Rollups on Bitcoin

Greg Sanders gsanders87 at gmail.com
Wed Oct 12 13:28:22 UTC 2022


Thanks for the writeup John,

Is there a one page cheat sheet of "asks" for transaction
introspection/OP_ZKP(?) and their uses both separately and together for
different rollup architectures?

On Tue, Oct 11, 2022 at 11:52 AM John Light via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Today I am publishing "Validity Rollups on Bitcoin", a report I produced
> as part of the Human Rights Foundation's ZK-Rollup Research Fellowship.
>
> Here's the preface:
>
> > Ever since Satoshi Nakamoto first publicly announced bitcoin, its
> supporters, critics, and skeptics alike have questioned how the protocol
> would scale as usage increases over time. This question is more important
> than ever today, as blocks are increasingly full or close to full of
> transactions. So-called "Layer 2" (L2) protocols such as the Lightning
> Network have been deployed to take some transaction volume "offchain" but
> even Lightning needs to use _some_ bitcoin block space. It's clear that as
> bitcoin is adopted by more and more of the world's population (human and
> machine alike!) more block space will be needed. Another thread of inquiry
> concerns whether bitcoin's limited scripting capabilities help or hinder
> its value as electronic cash. Researchers and inventors have shown that the
> electronic cash transactions first made possible by bitcoin could be given
> new form by improving transaction privacy, supporting new types of smart
> contracts, and even creating entirely new blockchain-based assets.
> >
> > One of the results of the decade-plus research into scaling and
> expanding the capabilities of blockchains such as bitcoin is the invention
> of the validity rollup. Given the observed benefits that validity rollups
> have for the blockchains that have already implemented them, attention now
> turns to the question of whether they would be beneficial for bitcoin and
> existing bitcoin L2 protocols such as Lightning, too. We explore this
> question by examining validity rollups from several angles, including their
> history, how they work on a technical level, how they could be built on
> bitcoin, and what the benefits, costs, and risks of building them on
> bitcoin might be. We conclude that validity rollups have the potential to
> improve the scalability, privacy, and programmability of bitcoin without
> sacrificing bitcoin's core values or functionality as a peer-to-peer
> electronic cash system. Given the "trustless" nature of validity rollups as
> cryptographically-secured extensions of their parent chain, and given
> bitcoin's status as the most secure settlement layer, one could even say
> these protocols are a _perfect match_ for one another.
>
> You can find the full report here:
>
> https://bitcoinrollups.org
>
> Happy to receive any comments and answer any questions the bitcoin dev
> community may have about the report!
>
> Best regards,
> John Light
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20221012/4a38abb5/attachment.html>


More information about the bitcoin-dev mailing list