Yeah, I think I see it as there are other coins that are smart contract coins. If you created another coin, that's not making Bitcoin do something new. That's STX doing something, just like ETH does something. Rootstock manages to do alot without creating an altcoin.
Discussion
Ethereum cannot read or write to Bitcoin. Stacks can and does and has its own wire formats and op codes, which is why this works on Stacks and not on any other existing chains.
Okay, every feature that I see that Stacks does, and it has a bunch, I just see it as a feature of Stacks. (I never look at a feature of Stacks and think "Bitcoin does that." I do when I see micropayments on Lightning, for example.)
I agree with you and did not mean to suggest otherwise. Existing implementation is not Bitcoin, just uses Bitcoin in a novel way. Future implementations will change this however, in precisely the way suggested by #[2]
#[0] re: #[1]
New thread to avoid spamming others. Preface: don't buy shitcoins.
How does Rootstock fit into this? Is it 'true' Bitcoin? I like Rootstock for what it attempts to do without a shitcoin. But I dislike it for the tradeoffs therein -- being based entirely on a federated peg that uses obscure signing hardware to channel network fees directly to the founders and their friends; it being a full-bore sidechain that does not validate on or fork with Bitcoin; its use of the EVM which I think is crap in general.
I dislike Stacks for its use of an ICO shitcoin and have been vocal about that with their community. I dislike it for its (currently) centralized nature, with too few nodes and miners driving the network, and still relying on the foundation to pay for developers to build out the protocol and the ecosystem. Incentive alignments are all over the place. Despite this I am willing to dabble and entertain some of their ideas if they are 'good enough' ideas with a chance of working, even if a shitcoin is involved on some level.
One of those ideas is this. Hypothetically, suppose that the Stacks protocol had a trust-minimized two-way Bitcoin peg, using taproot contracts operated at the protocol level, with the desirable property of open membership for operators as opposed to a closed federation. Now suppose that you could then use that pegged BTC *as the gas token* to make payments and use smart contracts, without ever interacting with the STX shitcoin. Then the Stacks protocol would be *at least* as much 'true' Bitcoin as Rootstock; arguably more so.