BitcoinOS: Bringing Crypto Home To Bitcoin
The following is a new version of the original BitcoinOS manifesto published in September 2024. This includes more comprehensive details about BitcoinOS and a refined explanation of the project’s vision.
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Welcome To BitcoinOS
BitcoinOS (BOS) is the most revolutionary technical breakthrough in crypto since the dawn of Bitcoin itself.
After fifteen years of tribal warfare between competing blockchains, fragmented liquidity, and siloed innovation, cryptographers have finally discovered how to unite the entire ecosystem around Bitcoin's unmatched security and network effects.
With BOS, the oldest and largest blockchain network has an operating system that serves as an all-in-one solution for both Bitcoin and the broader crypto ecosystem. For Bitcoin, it unlocks the infinite scalability, privacy, and programmability of crypto without any compromises to its core properties. For the crypto ecosystem, it provides direct access to Bitcoin's massive liquidity, unmatched security, and institutional-grade reputation.
This unprecedented collaboration can be achieved without sacrificing Bitcoin's decentralization, compromising its security, or requiring any consensus changes to Bitcoin Core.
The secret lies in a powerful cryptographic tool called "zero-knowledge proofs", or "ZKPs" – a method for verifying information from the outside world without revealing the content of that information.
In July 2024, the BTC_OS team verified the first-ever ZKP on the Bitcoin mainchain – a feat that experts long considered impossible. The implications of this discovery are difficult to overstate. Using ZKPs, BOS allows Bitcoin to fulfill its original promise to be peer-to-peer digital money for the entire planet, while forever remaining a decentralized, immutable, and secure bedrock of truth.
Moreover, ZKPs give developers across the world the power to upgrade Bitcoin in any fashion they like – permissionlessly. That makes Bitcoin not only a sound monetary network, but an unstoppable "permaware" – an operating system for securing an entire decentralized world.
BOS creates a new chapter of collaboration and innovation in crypto. By serving as a nexus point for various blockchain solutions to integrate with Bitcoin's security and network effects, BOS enables the $3.5 trillion crypto ecosystem to end its tribal conflicts and fragmentation, replacing competition with collaboration around Bitcoin's fundamental strengths.
With BOS, Bitcoin is officially back – and this time, it's bringing the whole family home.
Bitcoin: Promise And Problems
The Bitcoin whitepaper envisioned Bitcoin as the first "peer-to-peer electronic cash system." It would enable anyone, anywhere to transact digitally without trusting centralized third parties with their data and assets to mediate payments. Today, holders primarily value BTC for its limited supply guarantee and lack of counterparty risk, making it the ultimate haven for protecting their wealth.
Unfortunately, Bitcoin still hasn't lived up to the full potential its pioneers imagined. It can help exponentially more people in countless more ways, but key technical constraints have prevented it from doing so.
Scaling: Bitcoin's blockchain can only process approximately 3 to 7 new transactions per second. During peak demand, Bitcoin's fees often rise to over $10 per transaction – making small consumer payments impossible or utterly impractical.
Privacy: Transactions on Bitcoin are permanent and observable by all. Poor privacy enables oppressive regimes to enforce outright bans on Bitcoin, hampering network adoption and forcing the world back to tools that the elites control.
Programmability: Bitcoin doesn't allow for expressive smart contracts. Without smart contracts, accessing sophisticated financial services like borrowing, lending, and exchange requires holders to put their BTC back in the hands of middlemen.
Interoperability: The crypto ecosystem has become increasingly fragmented across multiple chains and Layer 2 solutions, each operating in isolation. This siloed approach has created significant friction for users and developers, preventing seamless value and data transfer between Bitcoin and other blockchain networks.
Poor Alternatives
For fifteen years, Bitcoin developers have endlessly debated how to remedy these core issues. While various solutions have been proposed and built, all come with critical tradeoffs that leave Bitcoin a shell of its former self.
Fundamentally, no past solutions could fully satisfy all three prongs of the "blockchain trilemma": security, scalability, and decentralization.
Lightning Network: enables instant, near-free BTC micropayments using bidirectional payment channels in a decentralized manner. Poor UX has forced it back towards centralization in practice, with users forfeiting control of their BTC to custodial wallets.
Sidechains: complimentary blockchains built to enhance Bitcoin by providing features to BTC holders that the regular Bitcoin blockchain cannot. They require a centralized company or federation to secure any BTC or other assets that were bridged to it from other chains.
Altcoins/ Layer 1s (L1s): Alternative Layer 1 (L1) networks with their own security mechanisms, programming languages, and functionality. Altcoins are often less secure than Bitcoin, have more centralized governance, and require a token other than BTC to use their systems. Their proliferation has also severely fragmented liquidity and users across the crypto landscape, creating isolated pools of value and activity that make the entire ecosystem less efficient and interconnected than it could be.
Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs): Formal requests to change Bitcoin's code to increase its functionality. Tampering with Bitcoin's code not only introduces technical risk, but also creates frictions within the community and surrounding industry that harm Bitcoin's precious stability and network effects (ex. the "blocksize war" between 2015 and 2017).
The Solution: Rollups On Bitcoin
What's needed is a decentralized, Layer 2 (L2) solution that enables permissionless upgrades to Bitcoin. It would respect the purity of Bitcoin's base layer, inherit base layer security, and require no middlemen to use your BTC. Bitcoin now has that solution. It's called "rollups."
What is a Rollup?
A rollup is an L2 execution environment designed to be more scalable and feature-rich than its parent L1 chain.
As transactions accumulate, rollup chains periodically "roll up" their transactions into data-efficient batches, which are submitted back down to L1 as a single transaction. In other words, thousands of off-bitcoin transactions can be rolled up into one Bitcoin transaction, making it possible to scale the Bitcoin network to thousands of new users.
Activating rollups requires the parent blockchain to be able to verify zero-knowledge proofs, or "ZKPs." A ZKP lets an L2 rollup prove to the L1 network that certain transactions have taken place without including the content of those transactions.
The Dawn of Bitcoin Rollups
In April 2024, BTC_OS unveiled BitSNARK – a new software library for efficiently verifying zkSNARKs on Bitcoin, which are a type of ZKP.
Thanks to BitSNARK, Bitcoin users can now create covenants – conditional payments that only execute when the right cryptographic proof is provided. Covenants are the key to building decentralized Bitcoin bridges – the "holy grail" innovation that enables true Bitcoin rollups.
These bridges only require a single honest participant within a pool of potentially hundreds of operators (1-of-n) in a decentralized, dynamic, and permissionless operator set for your funds to remain secure.
One of those operators could even be you, meaning if you become a verifier, the system is trustless for you. Finally, you can be your own BOS!
To better understand the architecture of Bitcoin-based rollups, see the BitSNARK and Grail whitepaper.
BOS: Crypto’s Nexus Point
BOS is not itself a rollup, nor any other kind of L2, blockchain, or execution environment. It’s something more fundamental and pivotal to the entire crypto landscape.
BOS serves as a nexus point where various blockchain solutions can trustlessly connect to Bitcoin. Through advanced zero-knowledge proof systems, it enables rollups, other L2s, and altchains, to leverage Bitcoin's security and network effects while maintaining their unique features and capabilities.
This symbiotic relationship benefits everyone: Bitcoin users gain access to advanced smart contract functionality, privacy features, and scaling solutions developed by the crypto ecosystem, while crypto projects and their users can tap into Bitcoin's massive liquidity pool, superior security model, and institutional credibility. It's a win-win solution that elevates the entire blockchain space.
Moreover, BOS creates a unified ecosystem where different blockchain solutions can interact and share liquidity while benefiting from Bitcoin's fundamental strengths.
$BOS Token
At the heart of this interoperability is the $BOS token, which acts as a crucial coordination mechanism ensuring that every system plugging into Bitcoin maintains consistent security standards and service levels.
Through SLAM node staking and economic incentives, the $BOS token creates a framework where multiple chains and execution environments can seamlessly interact, finally uniting the fragmented crypto ecosystem around Bitcoin's dominant presence.
SLAM Nodes
SLAM nodes play a critical role in facilitating cross-chain interactions by:
- Verifying ZK proofs across multiple chains and execution environments
- Managing multichain vaults that enable secure asset transfers between different blockchains
- Operating token indexing services that track assets across integrated chains
- Facilitating atomic swaps between different blockchain networks
- Processing cross-chain messages and maintaining state synchronization
Read more about $BOS token utility and SLAM node mechanics →
Programmable Tokens
Beyond secure bridging and rollups, BOS introduces programmable, chain-agnostic tokens secured by Bitcoin's network. These tokens can embed smart contract logic directly through ZK proofs, enabling them to exist and operate seamlessly across multiple chains and execution environments.
This revolutionary capability allows tokens to maintain their programmed behaviors and properties regardless of which chain they're operating on.
BOS nodes act as the connective tissue of this ecosystem, processing proofs and maintaining state across chains. By coordinating through the $BOS token incentive system, these nodes ensure that the entire Bitcoin L2 landscape operates as one cohesive system for users - whether they're trading assets, executing smart contracts, or moving value between chains.
Why BOS Beats Everything
Under the BOS model, the centralization and security assumptions of the fabric between Bitcoin L2s can be reduced to the point of being nearly trustless.
Therefore, BOS satisfies every single prong of the blockchain trilemma in a way that all previous scaling solutions have failed to.
Lightning: Rollups provide the decentralization, speed, and L1 security guarantees of the lightning network, but without the UX challenges of channel management.
Sidechains: Rollups boast the flexibility and scalability of sidechains, but they also inherit base layer security, and don't rely on centralized federations not to steal your BTC. In other words, rollups use an honest singleton 1-of-n trust model, rather than a voters' majority m-of-n trust model.
Altcoins/ Layer 1s: BOS allows developers to build major financial applications on Bitcoin, the most reliable and popular foundation, while maintaining the unique advantages of their own chains and Layer 2 solutions.
BIPs: BOS clears a path for builders to create a world of decentralized applications secured by Bitcoin, without waiting for a technically and politically dangerous consensus change to Bitcoin's code.
Bitcoin and Crypto: Fragmentation And Consolidation
Crypto – like other innovative new industries – is an experimental, risky, competitive, and highly fragmented environment.
Yet over time, history teaches us that effective dominant players begin to gobble up their competition and take over the ecosystem – especially as they exhibit economies of scale and network effects.
Over 15 years, countless blockchains and cryptocurrencies have emerged in an innovative race to build the best-decentralized systems, forming many siloed factions of users and capital.
Still, Bitcoin continues to dominate over 50% of the crypto market, despite lagging behind other blockchains on scaling and functionality to this point. This proves that Bitcoin's many network effects – its superior users, capital, mining security, brand, and first-mover advantage – are all incredibly powerful. They’ve made Bitcoin the institutional chain of choice, and turned it into a household name heard by virtually every investor. To the degree chains like Ethereum and Solana are still used, it is only to fulfill the roles that Bitcoin was technically incapable of.
But what happens when Bitcoin is no longer technically incapable? What happens when new systems – like BOS – let developers build anything on Bitcoin while maintaining the unique advantages of their existing solutions?
We've already seen a preview of Bitcoin's network effect in action with Ordinals, which rapidly captured significant NFT market share from Ethereum and Solana despite being a relatively simple innovation.
With BOS enabling sophisticated functionality across the entire crypto ecosystem, users would gain tremendous benefits from integrating with the biggest and sturdiest blockchain, creating massive opportunities for early adopters of this technology.
Development Roadmap
As of December 2024, here are the key milestones in our development journey:
Q1 2025: Launch BOS mainnet with Grail integration, BitSNARK audit completion, and $BOS token launch.
Q2 2025: Roll out ecosystem integrations across EVM chains, UTXO-based chains, SolanaVM, and MoveVM.
Q3 2025: Focus on comprehensive testing, scalability design, and economic framework implementation.
End of 2025: Achieve full deployment with a mature ecosystem of integrations and permissionless nodes.
View our detailed technical roadmap and development timeline →
Crypto is Coming Home to Bitcoin
Bitcoin is now free from the technical limitations that once prevented it from becoming a sound digital monetary system for the world. Crypto is finally free from the tribalism, fragmentation, and institutional distrust that has held it back for so long.
With BOS, BTC can scale from merely digital gold to being peer-to-peer electronic cash usable by 8 billion people for daily transactions, while simultaneously serving as the secure foundation that brings peace and collaboration to the wider blockchain ecosystem.
Bitcoin has unlocked privacy, smart contracts, and a world of functionality that was once fragmented across competing chains. BOS enables all of these features while allowing different blockchain solutions to maintain their unique advantages, ending the zero-sum competition of the past and ushering in an era of mutual benefit secured by Bitcoin.
Finally, BOS means Bitcoin can upgrade permissionlessly, without ever having to rely on a base layer hard fork or soft fork ever again. Consensus changes can be contained to uncontroversial patches and maintenance, rather than controversial functionality improvements that threaten the stability that Bitcoin best provides.
The war is over. It's time to bring blockchain developers, investors, and users together atop the chain that started it all. Bitcoin and crypto are about to be reborn, and we welcome you to witness it.
We are all early to Bitcoin again.
