Author: James O'Beirne 2022-08-19 16:33:37
Published on: 2022-08-19T16:33:37+00:00
The potential uses of OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (BIP-119) have been explored by James over the past few months. Congestion control is one of the main use cases for CTV, which allows deferring the chainspace required for the final settlement outputs but still immediately requires space for the inputs. This could help to smooth fees and create a less spiky incentive to mine, helping to avoid protocol failures for want of mempool/block space. In addition, direct-from-coinbase payouts seem like a desirable feature for mining pools which avoids some trust in pools. One limitation is the size of the coinbase outputs owed to constituent miners; this limits the number of participants in the pool. However, if the payout was instead a single OP_CTV output, an arbitrary number of pool participants could be paid out "atomically" within a single coinbase. CTV is very simple in both concept and implementation, and it is likely to continue to yield potential applications. "Settlement compression" seems like a useful thing, especially in light of a possible increase in L2 usage, and CTV seems like the simplest means to enable it. Interestingly, an analog for this pattern going the other direction is possible - non-interactive channel openings could allow opening a lightning channel with a merchant who doesn't want to have their spending keys constantly accessible from a point-of-sale, but can still parse/verify CTV commitments.
Updated on: 2023-05-22T21:01:12.804060+00:00