Bithoven: Formal Safety for Expressive Bitcoin Smart Contracts

TL;DR

Bithoven is a high-level language for Bitcoin smart contracts that enhances safety and expressiveness by integrating static analysis tools, enabling secure and efficient contract development within Bitcoin's constraints.

Contribution

It introduces Bithoven, a novel language with integrated safety checks that bridges the gap between expressiveness and formal safety in Bitcoin smart contracts.

Findings

Bithoven effectively prevents major consensus and logic defects.

It compiles to Bitcoin Script with efficiency comparable to hand-optimized code.

The approach maintains modest computational overhead.

Abstract

The rigorous security model of Bitcoin's UTXO architecture often comes at the cost of developer usability, forcing a reliance on manual stack manipulation that leads to critical financial vulnerabilities like signature malleability, unspendable states and unconstrained execution paths. Industry standards such as Miniscript provide necessary abstractions for policy verification but do not model the full imperative logic required for complex contracts, leaving gaps in state management and resource liveness. This paper introduces Bithoven, a high-level language designed to bridge the gap between expressiveness and formal safety. By integrating a strict type checker and a resource liveness analyzer with a semantic control-flow analyzer, Bithoven eliminates major categories of consensus and logic defects defined in our fault model prior to deployment. Our results indicate that this safety comes at modest cost: Bithoven compiles to Bitcoin Script with efficiency comparable to hand-optimized code, demonstrating that type-safe, developer-friendly abstractions are viable even within the strict byte-size constraints of the Bitcoin blockchain.