Bitcoin's New Virtual Machine: A Game-Changer for Trustless Computing?
Bitcoin's scripting language has been intentionally kept small and restrictive to maintain its security and simplicity. However, this limitation prevents it from running complex programs like Ethereum's virtual machine, which would require a consensus change on Bitcoin.
Enter BitVM (Bitcoin Virtual Machine), a design that allows arbitrary programs to be verified on Bitcoin without changing its consensus rules. This is achieved by running computations off-chain between two parties and only posting a short challenge-response game if one side lies.
The original paper on BitVM was published by Robin Linus in October 2023, and it forms the basis for most trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge designs since then. The largest production implementation of a BitVM bridge was built by Bitlayer but was discontinued after eleven months due to economic reasons rather than cryptographic flaws.