I want to save 0.05 BTC, but the system says that denomination doesn’t exist.
There are only three options: 0.01, 0.1, and 1—no custom input box. I thought the UI was unfinished, but after reading the documentation I finally understood: in BitVM3, the garbled circuit for the dispute has to be pre-signed for the entire transaction tree, so the amount must be fixed in advance. It’s not product laziness; it’s a fundamental constraint.
The frontend lets you create a vault with a couple of clicks, which looks like modern DeFi; but under the hood, the logic is still governed by the old rules of Bitcoin Script.
BitVM3 really has pushed the on-chain cost of disputes down to around 9. The assertTx is only 56KB—nearly a thousand times smaller than BitVM2’s 4.8MB. That technical progress is real. But fixed denomination means large and small users share the same set of “faces.” If I lock 0.01 BTC and something goes wrong, I have to challenge it—at a cost of 9 blocks, which is 2.5% of the principal. If an institution locks 100 BTC, the same 9 blocks are just 0.0009% of the principal. The same security mechanism is a tax for retail users, but just pocket change for institutions.
More importantly, the contradiction lies in time. The official docs say the dispute window, under the current design, is still a matter of weeks. On-chain costs got cheaper, but the time didn’t. Compared with a ZK validity proof—that’s instant finality with no waiting period. TBV uses an optimistic model: you save on computation costs, but you pay in time. The technical choice itself isn’t “right” or “wrong,” but it directly determines who can use it: people who can wait weeks, and people who can’t, are two different markets.
Even if the $BABY burn/destroy mechanism is designed beautifully, it can’t change this underlying constraint. The combination of fixed denomination plus a multi-week challenge period can, in the short term, only serve institutional-level users. If retail users want flexible storage and custom amounts, they’ll have to wait for the infrastructure to evolve.
Babylon’s TBV isn’t about freeing all BTC—it’s about filtering who deserves to use it. Technical barriers won’t disappear just because the frontend looks nicer. #baby @BabylonLabs_io
There are only three options: 0.01, 0.1, and 1—no custom input box. I thought the UI was unfinished, but after reading the documentation I finally understood: in BitVM3, the garbled circuit for the dispute has to be pre-signed for the entire transaction tree, so the amount must be fixed in advance. It’s not product laziness; it’s a fundamental constraint.
The frontend lets you create a vault with a couple of clicks, which looks like modern DeFi; but under the hood, the logic is still governed by the old rules of Bitcoin Script.
BitVM3 really has pushed the on-chain cost of disputes down to around 9. The assertTx is only 56KB—nearly a thousand times smaller than BitVM2’s 4.8MB. That technical progress is real. But fixed denomination means large and small users share the same set of “faces.” If I lock 0.01 BTC and something goes wrong, I have to challenge it—at a cost of 9 blocks, which is 2.5% of the principal. If an institution locks 100 BTC, the same 9 blocks are just 0.0009% of the principal. The same security mechanism is a tax for retail users, but just pocket change for institutions.
More importantly, the contradiction lies in time. The official docs say the dispute window, under the current design, is still a matter of weeks. On-chain costs got cheaper, but the time didn’t. Compared with a ZK validity proof—that’s instant finality with no waiting period. TBV uses an optimistic model: you save on computation costs, but you pay in time. The technical choice itself isn’t “right” or “wrong,” but it directly determines who can use it: people who can wait weeks, and people who can’t, are two different markets.
Even if the $BABY burn/destroy mechanism is designed beautifully, it can’t change this underlying constraint. The combination of fixed denomination plus a multi-week challenge period can, in the short term, only serve institutional-level users. If retail users want flexible storage and custom amounts, they’ll have to wait for the infrastructure to evolve.
Babylon’s TBV isn’t about freeing all BTC—it’s about filtering who deserves to use it. Technical barriers won’t disappear just because the frontend looks nicer. #baby @BabylonLabs_io