Bitcoin supports ZK verification path exploration

Bitcoin, as a social system, relies on people's consensus on its essence and vision for stable operation. However, Bitcoin still faces many challenges, such as high transaction fees and insufficient privacy protection. To address these issues, the community has proposed various improvement plans, among which ZK and SNARKs technologies are considered the most effective.

Modifying the Bitcoin protocol is very difficult and requires a high level of consensus within the community. Therefore, exploring ways to improve Bitcoin's performance without changing the protocol has become a key issue. The UTXO model and scripting language of Bitcoin limit its functionality and do not directly support SNARK verification.

Currently, there are two main paths that may enable Bitcoin to support ZK verification:

1. Enhance Bitcoin script functionality by adding simple opcodes like OP_CAT to support SNARK verification. Although OP_CAT is simple, it can bring significant improvements, such as accessing on-chain state information and verifying Merkle proofs. However, this proposal has not yet reached consensus within the community.

2. Using BitVM technology, arbitrary computational tasks can be verified without modifying the protocol. BitVM overcomes block size limitations through Taproot MerkleTree and cross-script KV storage solutions, and employs a fraud proof mechanism to ensure security.

In addition, the Chain State Proofs technology combined with ZK can significantly reduce the operational costs of nodes, and is an important component of BitVM implementation. The "header chain Proofs" proposal put forward by the ZeroSync team further lightens this process.

Overall, the introduction of ZK verification features for Bitcoin is an inevitable trend, but the implementation path still needs further exploration and improvement. Regardless of the方案 adopted, the ultimate goal is to make Bitcoin more practical and support more real-world applications.