dntse

Half our team was terrified to do the BitVM experiment publicly.

"What if we fail? We'll look bad."

I told them: I'm tweeting. It's on me.

Where does security sharing come from?

Satoshi himself, circa 2010.

But merge mining had two critical flaws: PoW-only compatibility and the Bitcoin miner costless-attack problem.

Bitcoin staking with slashing solves both by using Bitcoin to secure PoS chains.

Every Ethereum proponent brings up the "Bitcoin security budget problem" from halvings.

Bitcoin has gone through multiple halvings over 16 years. Its security and adoption are at all-time highs.

Theory rarely matches practice.

Engineering principle: Never build to the absolute limit.

When designing Bitcoin staking, I wanted maximum timelock (~16 months).

Our engineers wisely insisted on 90% of max to account for edge cases.

BitVM's 3.9999MB transactions learned this lesson the hard way.

Network effects.

My Bitcoin DeFi thesis: We're not trying to kill Bitcoin or replace it with new chains.

Bitcoin holds 60-70% of crypto's market cap. New chains hold 30-40%. Bitcoin DeFi connects these two worlds.

One plus one equals three when you bridge the largest capital source with the most innovation.

We have four researchers (including two PhD students) working on one very concrete problem: reduce our BitVM transaction cost from $15,000 to $15.

25-30 hours of brainstorming so far. Still working on it.

It's rare to have a cryptography problem that's both deeply technical and has such a tangible, measurable goal.

Babylon creates a two-sided marketplace connecting Bitcoin holders with chains seeking Bitcoin's power.

On one side: Bitcoin stakers seeking yield without sacrificing security principles.

On the other: Protocols needing Bitcoin's security, liquidity, or both.

Bitcoin's scripting language is intentionally primitive—it can basically do addition and multiplication.

Building a ZK proof verifier in this environment is like writing assembly code to solve advanced cryptography.

The 1GB verifier compressed to 4MB chunks through 'tricks' shows what's possible within Bitcoin's constraints.

Interesting shift in crypto discourse: Infrastructure projects are being re-framed as yield generators.

At Bitcoin Vegas, I went from security/consensus panels to "how do you help Bitcoiners earn yield" discussions.

The market is devaluing hard infrastructure. But sustainable yield requires solid foundations.

Interesting.

Didn’t know about BitVMX: a "long lost family" in the BitVM ecosystem.

While BitVM2 uses ~4MB transactions, BitVMX achieves similar functionality with factor 5 to 10 smaller transactions.

Join us for the 4th Science and Engineering of Consensus workshop on the day before SBC’25 with another exciting line-up of speakers.

🗓️ When? Sunday, 3 August 2025
📍 Where? Tilden Room, MLK Building, Berkeley, CA
🎯 Registration (required to attend in-person): https://t.co/GGKgDMjwVz

Speakers:
@TheWattenhofer (Anza Solana & ETH Zurich), @benafisch (Yale & Espresso Systems), @dionyziz (Common Prefix), @yangl1996 (MegaETH), @siobhcroo (UC Berkeley), @andrewlewispye (London School of Economics), Victor Shoup (Offchain Labs & NYU) and Yu Shen (University of Edinburgh)

Let’s change the paradigm for a second.

With Bitcoin at a $2.2T market cap and Ethereum at ~$331B, the question isn't whether Bitcoin can compete.

It's whether anything else can.

The narrative has fundamentally shifted.

Projects now seek Bitcoin alignment rather than alternatives to it.

The strongest position in crypto is leveraging Bitcoin.

Real-world engineering lesson from our BitVM experiment: Never engineer to the absolute limit.

Our 3.9999MB block exceeded mining pool safety margins despite being under Bitcoin's 4MB cap. One mining pool offered manual processing for 1 BTC.

The BitVM community fixed it overnight.

Oh, an always leave room for error.

The Disprove tx.

The Babylon R & D team is about to run a pretty ambitious BitVM experiment.

A live-fire test on Bitcoin mainnet to see if the entire "unhappy path" actually works, something to the best of our knowledge no BitVM team has ever done before.

🧵 Here’s what we’re testing, and why it matters:

Nakamoto's paper only contained one true innovation:

The longest chain consensus protocol.

Everything else: proof of work, digital signatures, and incentives are existing ideas integrated into a coherent system.

The brilliance wasn't in specialization, but in synthesis. Bitcoin emerged from connecting disparate elements.

Bitcoin contains a curious parallel to quantum mechanics: once you interact with it, you fundamentally change it.

This property stems from Bitcoin's UTXO model and has profound implications.

I recently heard an attorney claim: "It's not a taxable event if you get back the original Bitcoin." This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding. There is no such thing as "original Bitcoin" in a technical sense.

In Bitcoin's architecture, coins don't exist as discrete objects. The system tracks Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXOs). When you receive Bitcoin, you receive a UTXO: an entry in the blockchain ledger.

But whenever you spend Bitcoin, the original UTXO is completely destroyed, and new UTXOs are created.

This process resembles quantum mechanics, where measurement changes the particle being observed.

The act of transacting with Bitcoin transforms it: UTXO A exists, transaction occurs, UTXO A is destroyed, UTXO B and C (change) now exist.

The new UTXOs have different transaction IDs, positions in the blockchain, and properties. They are not the same "Bitcoin" in any technical sense.

The narrative has shifted.

Projects are now approaching Babylon seeking Bitcoin alignment without prompting.

Bitcoin isn't just digital gold but an ecosystem advantage that protocols actively want to associate with.

Babylon's engineering focus has three clear priorities:

1. Integrating with many partner chains that seek Bitcoin alignment
2. Enhancing Babylon Genesis with EVM support and faster block times (from 10s to 2-3s)
3. Developing a Bitcoin bridge with minimized trust assumptions

Each advances Bitcoin's utility without changing its core protocol.

Building a trustless Bitcoin bridge presents unique challenges:

- Current solutions require significant operator capital (~10-20k security deposit to pay for dispute transactions)
- Front-running capital needs for bridge operations
- Complex trust assumptions