What is RSK?
Non-Technical Explanation of Sidechain
How will it improve the price of bitcoin
Conclusion
What is RSK?
How this new user-case for Bitcoin is not having a humongous buzz around it is beyond me, the hype is quite low if there is any.
"The Rootstock platform provides Turing-complete smart contracts as proposed by Nick Szabo in 1993. At the same time, RSK's VM is backward compatible with Ethereum VM, hence Rootstock gives the opportunity to developers working on Ethereum to benefit from the robustness of the Bitcoin Blockchain. " - Whitepaper
Rootstock is a sidechain pegged 1–1 to bitcoin, a two-way peg, meaning what is valid on the BTC network is valid on the RSK network and vis-versa. Using Bitcoin as the main chain for security, rootstock won't be running an ICO or pre-mint coins/pre-mine them, instead as a pegged side chain to bitcoin; every RSK is represented on the Bitcoin main.
Rootstock is turing complete, and this means that smart contracts will run correctly on it, it is projected to reach a tps of 300 transactions per second.
It is backward compatible with Ethereum, meaning that Ethereum smart contracts can easily migrate to RSK. With Oraclize service on the RSK network will enable this feature, it is a blockchain agnostic feature that will make different blockchain networks compatible with one another.
RSK will merge-mine with BTC, as of now, the RSK blockchain secured with 10% of BTC hashrate, which will provide security for the network, RSK mainnet hasn't launched yet, but the testnet has been running, expected lunch of mainnet if in June.
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Non-Technical Explanation of Sidechain.
RSK is a sidechain, means it depends on another chain for some features such as security, it has its own on chain consensus and relies on merge mining meaning miners mine both mainchain and sidechain at the same time. The mainchain works as usual and doesn't need to fork or change, then the RSK runs separately but relies on the transactions on the BTC.
In reality, there is no transfer between the chains; the funds are locked in one chain (the mainchain) for it to unlock in the other chain and vis-a-vis. These are automatically done and remains genuinely decentralized.
How will this improve the price of Bitcoin?
RSK as a platform will be the launching board for smart contracts if RSK becomes successfully and lots of projects migrate to it, this will increase the demand for Bitcoin for this reason alone the BTC prices will go up because of the increased usage.
RSK will increase the profits of Bitcoin miners; miners will make extra income through merge mining with RSK, this will help the profitability of mining bitcoin.
Conclusion
If the RSK team can achieve 300 tps as claimed after mainnet lunch and its backward compatibility using the oraclize service is valid, then lots of projects will migrate to RSK from other projects.it will be more secure and scalable than the rest, not even Ethereum is as scalable, and the backward compatibility is a game changer.
So we have all these features in a project that will be dependent on transactions on Bitcoin, this will influence the Bitcoin network positive way both in price, use, and importance. Though this will take time to be perfect with time it will grow to be huge; unfortunately, there won't be ICO sales (no official announcement- but I don't see the likelihood if it will is paired to BTC and no pre-mining)
This project is enormous and will be a major talking point once its out entirely hopefully next month.
Reference
https://blog.oraclize.it/launching-the-oraclize-service-on-rsk-9141265b7e50
https://steemit.com/blockchain/@haji/what-is-rootstock
https://blog.trezor.io/trezor-firmware-updated-to-1-5-0-7a402d3e9f89
https://www.coindesk.com/first-bitcoin-smart-contracts-sidechain-now-secured-1-10-miners/
