I'm not really sure about this, but I think I'm in a slowly growing group of people who are gravitating to this thesis: between witness encryption (WE), functional encryption (FE) and indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), listed in increasing order of power and decreasing closeness to actual existence, there is a slowly clarifying path to bitcoin becoming practical. It's "practical" already, to be clear, especially with Lightning (confident in saying so, as I actually use it, unlike all the influencers on twitter). But that's quite limited. The potential future is one that's a lot more fun and a lot less about arguing with each other ... a bit like the very early days where for a lot of people Bitcoin felt very "the sky's the limit" in terms of introducing whacky new schemes and systems. A lot of that was kind of deluded, but at least it *was* fun, something that's a bit lacking "here" nowadays (yes you have it on nostr, sure, but nostr is not money!). If we even get the simplest of the 3, witness encryption, with enough generality, it could obviate the need for lots of arguments about op_codes and people will be able to build genuinely interesting offchain constructions where people can do things like super-low cost txs without any setup or collateral, or engage in bets or smart contracts etc. etc. .. with WE it's clunky because of the background onchain plumbing being a bit messier. With FE you can have the same things, or better, and it's a lot more streamlined, I think. But FE only exists in sort of toy form for now (so called "inner product functional encryption" is very elegant but extremely limited, afaict). As for iO, it allows you to do .. basically exactly anything (every existing crypto primitive can be done with iO, and others too), which is probably why it remains just a theory for now. #bitcoin #cryptography