This is the basic model of Ethereum, which is a project to create a novel blockchain in addition to a programming language and virtual machine for the creation of smart contracts. But the development of a new blockchain is unnecessarily slow and risky. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we, the cryptocurrency community, should be making evolutionary, tractable improvements to Bitcoin itself, whenever possible.

With Counterparty Contracts, users may write Turing Complete smart contracts into the Bitcoin blockchain and execute their code on all Counterparty nodes. We’ve ported Ethereum’s language and virtual machine over to the Counterparty platform, using the pyethereum codebase. The result is hosted on GitHub and open for public testing. Today, you can take Turing Complete Ethereum code, or write your own, and run it on Bitcoin with Counterparty. Anything that one could ever do with Ethereum, one can now do with Bitcoin and Counterparty.

It will be interesting to see the Ethereum team's response.