Author: Jeremy 2022-01-05 22:44:54
Published on: 2022-01-05T22:44:54+00:00
In an email response to a thread, Bitcoin developer Jeremy Rubin advocates for covenants as an important aspect of Bitcoin's future. Covenants provide robustness to privacy, scalability, self-custody, and decentralization. Rubin introduces CTV, which is designed to be the simplest and least risky covenant specification that still delivers sufficient flexibility and power to build useful applications. During the last two years, CTV has been reviewed by many people, and there have not been any conceptual or concrete NACKs for CTV to introduce any risk or vulnerability to Bitcoin. Rubin addresses concerns about CTV not being flexible or general enough to make interesting applications and points out that accepting an upgrade for limited covenants, like CTV, will give rise to many application builders including covenants in their stack for batching, vaults, or other applications. Rubin also mentions that CTV composes with potential future upgrades and is non-rival with any other upgrade. Rubin emphasizes that software development is path-dependent and accepting an upgrade for limited covenants will encourage more developers to contribute to generic tooling to determine what other types of covenant would be safe and high value for those already using CTV. Rubin published an essay "Roadmap or Load o' Crap," which presents a hypothetical path for 'completing' BIP-119 this year and analyzes some possible future work as well as the timeline viability of some alternatives based on his best understandings. Rubin states that nowhere has he called for an imminent contentious soft fork attempt. All he is doing is agitating for other developers to perform reviews. Rubin concludes by stating that his journey is not ego-driven but about finding a pragmatic and low-risk path to reinforcing Bitcoin's fundamentals for the coming year. He wants Bitcoin to be the best it can be and highlights that everyone is united in wanting Bitcoin to be the best that it can be.
Updated on: 2023-05-22T16:30:58.539313+00:00