Motion: Trustless smart contracts for Bitcoin is impossible without forking (Ruben Somsen vs. Muneeb Ali)

The Blockchain Debate Podcast

Guests:
Ruben Somsen (twitter.com/SomsenRuben)
Muneeb Ali (twitter.com/muneeb)
Host:
Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09)

Today’s motion is “Trustless smart contracts for bitcoin are impossible without forks.”

A few projects have been known to try to bring smart contracts to bitcoin. But are they doing this in a way as you understand it? This episode explores this question. We pitted a bitcoin developer against the founder of Stacks, and you can draw your own conclusions after listening.

We discussed:
* How Stacks differentiates itself from other projects that also operate at the intersection of bitcoin and smart contracts.
* Whether there is a trustless way to fully utilize bitcoin on the STX chain.
* The robustness of the reward mechanism for staking STX (or “stacking”) in return for rewards in BTC.
* We also went off course a bit and spent a significant amount of time discussing adoption of Stacks in the bitcoin community, since Stacks introduced yet another altcoin, generally not something welcomed by the bitcoiners.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.
Source of select items discussed in the debate (and supplemental material):

• Stacks 2.0 Whitepaper: https://blog.stacks.co/stacks-2-whitepaper
• Ruben Somsen’s work: tiny.cc/somsen
• Spacechain explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY8CDEpg5_U
• Unhashed podcast: https://www.unhashedpodcast.com

Guest bios:
Ruben Somsen is a self-proclaimed Bitcoin Sorcerer. He does protocol design in order to enhance Bitcoin. He has previously proposed softchains, statechains and spacechains for Bitcoin. He also helps maintain the bitcoin-dev mailing list, and is co-host of the Unhashed Podcast. Lastly, he is organizer/founder of the Seoul Bitcoin Meetup.
Dr. Muneeb Ali is the founder of Stacks, a decentralized network that brings apps and smart contracts to Bitcoin. He serves as the CEO of Hiro a company that builds developer tools for the Stacks blockchain. He has raised $75 million USD in funding from investors like Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, Lux Capital, Winklevoss Capital, and others.