V God talks about what Bitcoin developers can learn from the Ethereum journey

On July 7, Vitalik Buterin and Bitcoin proponents Eric Wall and Udi Wertheimer discussed at length in a Twitter Space what Bitcoin developers can learn from Ethereum developers.

Eric Wall and Udi Wertheimer, two prominent figures in the Ordinals project Taproot Wizards, publicly support Ordinals and often advocate for enhancements to be built on top of the Bitcoin network.

Buterin said that he once studied the Pie Bitcoin tool and tried to create a Python library to do Bitcoin things.

Buterin said that Ordinals revived Bitcoin’s “builder culture” and highly praised Ordinals, BRC 20 standards, and believed that the move was a boost to the “stagnant” Bitcoin ecosystem. Ecology brings back a culture of practical action, which is a good thing.”

In addition, the three discussed the scalability of the Bitcoin ecosystem. According to Wall, the Lightning Network is not adaptable to future users and often fails when processing “medium-sized payments.” In response, Buterin responded that the best approach is to focus on implementing different types of Layer-2 solutions while finding ways to make the Bitcoin base layer more efficient.

But Wertheimer believes that it is good to focus on rollups and introduce Layer-2, but once rollups are adopted, the Bitcoin network can deploy smart contracts.

Still, Wall and Wertheimer’s views have been criticized by fundamentalist Bitcoin supporters. They argue that the use of NFTs and smart contracts on Bitcoin would diminish its primary function as a peer-to-peer cash network. Those critics included Jan 3 CEO Samson Mow, who argued that Ordinals wasted block space that could have been used for bitcoin payments.

But Wall responded that Bitcoin can be used as a “proof system” for zero-knowledge proofs without congesting the network. We (Bitcoin supporters) always want to do things related to DeFi, but we just want the Bitcoin base layer to act as the referee or arbiter of computation without having to run the computation on-chain.

Wall also thinks that we shouldn’t just think of Layers as a means of payment, but I think we can also think about what they can do more.

This discussion has caused new controversy in the Bitcoin community, such as Blockstream CEO Adam Beck objecting to this, “We have told them what to avoid in terms of security/complexity, Bitcoin did in 2014 smart thing to avoid problems, and they ignored us and did the opposite, so I’m not sure how much there is to learn.”