This post is for anyone who wants to dive into Bitcoin layer-2 development, contribute to protocol-level systems, and understand how smart contracts can exist on Bitcoin without forks or bridges.
It’s also my journey from knowing almost nothing about Bitcoin scripting to designing a trust-minimized, zero-collateral lottery on Ark.
In Zero-Collateral Paper the authors highlighted a fundamental limitation in Bitcoin's ability to support multi-party applications. Their Bitcoin impl, while theoretically sound, required $O(2^N)$ pre-signed Tx for N participants, making it practically unusable for anything beyond toy examples. Fast forward to emergence of the Ark protocol has fundamentally changed what's possible on Bitcoin.
Over the summer I've been working on implementing a production ready zero-collateral lottery system that addresses these scalability concerns while maintaining the cryptographic guarantees that make such system trustworthy.