Edit 3: See my nested child comment. My understanding (from a 2010 conversation with a friend who was deep in btc) was that there was a time where bitcoin scripting could cause transactions to appear onchain that would look valid to a novice but would not actually perform the actions described such that a scam could be perpetrated. I have not done the work to validate these claims. I stand by my comments on Eth and Satoshi Dice.

The crazy thing is: bitcoin was ethereum.

The community killed scripting because it was antithetical to the thing that makes money in BTC: trust. The constant flow of n00bs coming in who got their transactions reversed by OP codes and said "BUT I THOUGHT BITCOIN TRANSACTIONS WERE IRREVERSIBLE!!?!?!!?!?!1111" was eroding trust in the ecosystem.

Really, I think the beginning of bitcoin jumping the shark was Satoshi Dice: https://www.coindesk.com/company/satoshidice.

Anyways, Bitcoin off-chain scripting won't replace Eth anymore than any other off-chain scripting system will replace Eth. If this kills Eth it will be because people don't want on-chain scripting, not because people want off-chain scripting on bitcoin (ergo, the meta problem is that on-chain scripting doesn't scale in every sense of the word scale; fees, tx speed, finality, etc).

Caveat emptor: it's entirely possible this company could work or take off. In crypto, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Edit: Just to be extra clear, the problems with ethereum, to me at least, aren't actually on-chain scaling; that feels solvable. What feels unsolvable to me is two things: 1) turing completeness and 2) compilation malleability (if the compiler/machine can change but the code can't, guess what, old code's behavior becomes less predictable over time... computing systems with longevity gain minimal entropy over time).

Edit 2: The only rational way I can make sense of turing completeness and compilation malleability as features is if the ecosystem is engineering ecological behavior in, that is to say: old programs should become less valuable unless they accurately predicted the future. Maybe that's rational?

> The community killed scripting because it was antithetical to the thing that makes money in BTC: trust. The constant flow of n00bs coming in who got their transactions reversed by OP codes and said "BUT I THOUGHT BITCOIN TRANSACTIONS WERE IRREVERSIBLE!!?!?!!?!?!1111" was eroding trust in the ecosystem.

I never heard of all of this having happened. To my knowledge Bitcoin's scripting language was not trimmed, it was in fact extended over the years by various BIPs [1].

What's your source for these statements?

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips