Does anyone else think that Solidity is far too low-level for the purpose it serves? I really don't think connecting to ports (as an example) should be something in a financial contract.
But no, they had to make it Turing-complete. That failed quickly. Remember the DAO debacle. That should have been a teaching moment. But no. Because the people burned were insiders, the whole Etherium blockchain was split to rescue them.
https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.7.0/search.html?q=port
The more I see people burning themselves on “smart contracts” the more I realize how deeply thought through bitcoin’s design is. Creators have thought of so many things in advance, it’s outright creepy.
Blockstream has no control over bitcoin protocol. They built a product on top of it and there isn’t anything in bitcoin that prevents you from building a competing product.