Will Bitcoin be upgraded significantly? Read the soft fork of Bitcoin Thunderbolt in one article

Original title: "The Current Situation of Bitcoin Expansion Plan and the Major Upgrade of Bitcoin"

Author: 527 (X: @Eth527 )

This is a hardcore article, but I observed a huge narrative brewing quietly. Many people don’t know that BTC has completed a significant soft fork Bitcoin Thunderbolt, which means Bitcoin introduces native programmability. People who understand this naturally understand what this means, and those who don’t understand will understand it after reading this article. The big one is coming!

1. Dilemma of lack of native expansion schemes

Bitcoin is well-known worldwide for its unparalleled security, but its limitations in scalability have failed to fully utilize the asset value on the Bitcoin chain. The launch of the Ordinals protocol has stimulated people's expectations for the expansion potential of Bitcoin and brought new development opportunities to the Bitcoin ecosystem. Against this background, multiple expansion plans have emerged, trying to unleash the potential of on-chain assets and promote the prosperity of on-chain ecology.

However, existing expansion solutions often sacrifice the nativeity of Bitcoin, introducing additional trust costs and security risks. Although these programs attract a small number of users through incentive mechanisms and stimulate a certain market enthusiasm in a short period of time, as the incentives decline, these participants also lose interest and gradually lose interest. For example, Babylon, which suffered a tragic defeat in Waterloo, has only been launched for 24 hours, and BTC worth more than US$2,100 W withdrew its pledge from the agreement. The reason is that Babylon's technical solution requires locking BTC in exchange for side chain assets. The main chain Bitcoin assets cannot be used directly. This path weakens the attractiveness to Bitcoin native users, and participants will leave as soon as they get the airdrop.

The same is true for Bitlayer, which is popular, is advertised as the "fastest-growing Bitcoin Layer 2, but after its crazy incentive mechanism is over, prosperity is gone because participants are more concerned about short-term returns than staying in the ecosystem for a long time. Because Bitlayer users need to convert BTC into on-chain tokens through a custody bridge, which means strong dependence and potential risks on third-party custody. Once it is not profitable, users will quickly transfer their own BTC.

In summary, it turns out that the expansion solution that is out of native is very attractive to Bitcoin users and is not a real solution.

2. Native enhancement: the true direction of Bitcoin expansion

Home is increasingly aware that only by directly working on the Bitcoin protocol level can we truly break through the bottleneck. Among them, the idea represented by @nubit_org is attracting attention. Nubit has promoted Bitcoin Thunderbolt - a soft fork in the base layer of Bitcoin, which directly modifys the Bitcoin protocol to provide higher transaction speeds and programmability. For example, through UTXO Bundling technology, the transaction speed is 10 times faster than traditional Bitcoin; for example, the introduction of OP_CAT opcode supports direct development and application on Bitcoin, realizing native programmability; for example, Goldinals integrates BRC-20, Runes and Ordinals standards to unify asset protocols; and BitMM also implements trustless on-chain transactions.

This expansion is "on the main chain", that is, native BTC can directly participate in smart contracts and transactions without the need for cross-chain packaging alternatives. Nubit's native expansion solution does not require traditional cross-chain bridges, and its verification is completely completed on-chain and there is no risk of third-party hosting.

3. Comparison of path advantages and disadvantages

In order to let readers better understand the differences between native expansion solutions and other expansion solutions, we have created a form for everyone to take a look at:

Based on these, we can find that the advantages brought by "native" are all-round: the security is exempted from intermediary, the cost of trust is almost zero, the asset utilization does not waste Bitcoin liquidity, and the ecological development resonates with Bitcoin growth. Of course, the challenge of native solutions is that they are difficult to implement, and often require consensus in the Bitcoin community (such as soft fork upgrades) to be implemented. This makes native paths likely to be slow in advancement, requiring strong technical argumentation and community mobilization capabilities.

4. The importance of "nativeness" to Bitcoin value capture

In addition to the feasibility of the expansion plan, nativeity is also very important to promote the ecological value of Bitcoin.

1. Safety spillover effect:

The non-native expansion solution allows a large number of transactions and fees to occur on other chains, and only a small number of locked/unlocked transactions can be seen on the main Bitcoin network. Bitcoin itself does not gain profits from these Layer 2 transactions, and in the long run, it will not directly improve the security and value support of the main network. The native expansion plan allows transaction activities to occur on the Bitcoin main network, and each transaction brings fee income to Bitcoin miners, thereby enhancing the security budget and computing power stability of the Bitcoin network. This effect is particularly critical for Bitcoin to maintain security by relying solely on handling fees after the future halving.

2. Value belonging:

Babylon and Bitlayer have their own native tokens that serve as payment of fees or governance. A part of the ecological value is captured by these new tokens, diluting BTC 's status as the sole carrier of value. For example, Babylon users are more concerned about the price and returns of BABY tokens, rather than the price of BTC itself; if DeFi is running on Bitlayer, the contract tokens and governance coins on its chain may be popular, while BTC only exists as collateral. In the long run, if Bitcoin’s innovation dividend is taken away by other tokens, it is not ideal for pure BTC investors. In the native expansion solution, all applications use BTC directly as the pricing and settlement assets. Whether it issuing tokens, NFTs or running decentralized applications, the underlying consumption is BTC. Demand for BTC is rising as applications prosper, and BTC holders benefit from this ecosystem growth.

In general, "native" means that Bitcoin 's own value can participate and amplify, rather than native means that value may spill over. For investors who believe in the long-term value of Bitcoin, the native solution is undoubtedly more in line with their interests.

5. The last sentence

By comparing the existing expansion solutions, the native and random path shows its unique advantages, not only solving the bottleneck of Bitcoin expansion, but also maintaining the security and trustlessness of Bitcoin. This huge innovation is nurturing a very explosive narrative that is worthy of further analysis and follow-up by all investors. As the implementer of Bitcoin Thunderbolt, Nubit represents a native expansion that has brought Bitcoin to a major upgrade, becoming the first Bitcoin project recognized by HSBC in its latest report.