There are current talks within the Bitcoin community saying that Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, and the founder and CEO of Square, plans to fork Bitcoin to create a chain that will allow it to handle smart contracts.
Should this make you excited?
In my opinion, it should not. Bitcoin already has a lot of forks. The closest fork that comes with Dorsey's plan is Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) which is unsuccessful not only in defeating Bitcoin but also Ethereum.
If Dorsey plans for this Bitcoin fork to become the chain of a decentralized Twitter, it will be a heavily modified chain. In order for Bitcoin to support smart contract functionality without sacrificing decentralization, security and scalability, much of Bitcoin's code need to be modified, leaving only very few remnants of Bitcoin.
This makes it much better to create a new chain from scratch or build on top of existing smart contract chains. Another challenge is the proof-of-work consensus of Bitcoin which have been heavily criticized for its adverse environmental effects and massive energy consumption.
Besides Ethereum, there are also a lot of smart contract functions which are currently performing better in terms of scalability. Developers are heavily building on Solana, Avalanche, Cosmos, Algorand, Kardiachain and Binance Smart Chain in addition to Ethereum.
In addition, if Dorsey pursues his plan, it will surely divide the Bitcoin community again which could hardly find consensus and agreement even on simple matters. Some miners may migrate with his fork but a decade of Bitcoin's history taught us that Bitcoin will still reign king against its faster forks.
For some this may appear only as a rumor or plans not set in stone but we know in the crypto space that when there is smoke, there is fire.