How To Save Fees in Bitcoin Smart Contracts: a Simple Optimistic Off-chain Protocol

arXiv:2403.09880v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We consider the execution of smart contracts on Bitcoin. There, every contract step corresponds to appending to the blockchain a new transaction that spends the output representing the old contract state, creating a new one for the updated state. This standard procedure requires the contract participants to pay transaction fees for every execution step. In this paper, we introduce a protocol that moves most of the execution of a Bitcoin contract off-chain. When all participants …

arxiv bitcoin blockchain contract contracts cs.cr fees old procedure protocol simple smart smart contracts standard state transaction