Last October Robin Linus from Zerosync dropped a bit of a bomb in the form of BitVM. One of the longest running criticisms of Bitcoin is that it is not possible to make arbitrary programs to control how money is spent or locked. Bitcoin only has a very limited amount of programmability in its scripting language, and the primitives available are extremely constrained. You can check a signature, you can add a timelock to something, you can manipulate data in a few simple ways, but that’s it.

You can program a Bitcoin UTXO to require a signature check, a timelock verification, etc. But you cannot program it to unlock based on any arbitrary conditions. Robin’s insight with BitVM was that…

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