Designing Around Bitcoin's Fee Reality: What You Need to Know About BitVM2

When you're building on Bitcoin, bridges aren't fancy—they're just pre-signed transaction graphs locked behind timelocks. Sounds simple until you realize the entire system hinges on one thing: fees.

Here's the catch: if a parent transaction gets stuck, everything downstream stalls with it. You can't just bump fees and move on like you might on other chains. Bitcoin's confirmation dynamics mean your carefully orchestrated sequence of transactions becomes a hostage to network congestion.

Liveness becomes less about clever engineering and more about dealing with fee spikes. When the network gets busy, suddenly those transactions you signed weeks ago might not clear fast enough. The timelock ticks. Delays cascade. What looked bulletproof in testnet starts showing its cracks when reality hits.

This is BitVM2's unhappy path—where things don't go according to plan. Understanding how fees actually propagate through these transaction chains isn't optional if you're serious about building reliable bridge infrastructure. The architecture has to account for it from day one, not patch it later.