In this discussion Christopher Burniske will lead a discussion diving into the details of Sergio Lerner’s Rootstock (RSK), as his team works to bring a fully functional smart contract platform to Bitcoin. The reading material is the Rootstock whitepaper, which can be found here: http://www.rsk.co/#resources

While the floor is always open, some topics that we’d like to cover are: 

Merge mining: is this a realistic possibility? The Blockstack team found with Namecoin that if the majority of Bitcoin miners don’t move to support a chain offering merge mining then that chain becomes vulnerable to attack. What does RSK have that will make it a successful merge mining implementation? 

Sidechains have been slow to roll out, admittedly due to the need for a few more updates in core. That said, Drivechains appear a promising implementation, and we’ll discuss why (or why not). 

Security: Sergio’s core competency is security, and he began in the space as a Bitcoin security auditor. What in RSK’s architecture will help it avoid some of the security vulnerabilities we have recently become aware of with Ethereum? Is the segregation of the protocol layers inherent to RSK being built on top of Bitcoin actually a more sound system design?

Competition: Are RSK and Ethereum collaborators or competitors? RSK will be backwards compatible with Ethereum. Is there a reason for developers to run on both, or will one slowly strangle the other? Of note, ether.camp is a partner of RSK’s.