Author: James O'Beirne 2023-01-09 16:07:54
Published on: 2023-01-09T16:07:54+00:00
The author of the context, James O'Beirne, has been interested in vaults as a way to minimize the risk of custodying Bitcoin for personal and commercial use. To implement vaults, some kind of covenant-enabling consensus functionality is necessary. Last year, James experimented with using OP_CTV, a limited covenant mechanism, to create a "minimum-viable" vault design but found that precomputed covenant schemes were not suitable for this use. Proposed "general" covenant schemes were also unsuitable due to bloated scriptPubKeys and social-consensus quagmire regarding which covenant proposal to deploy. Therefore, James proposed an alternative design, OP_VAULT, that would deliver the safety benefits of vaults to users without getting hung up on trying to solve the general problem of covenants. He wrote a paper summarizing his findings and the resulting proposal and provided an accompanying draft implementation. Although it may not be considered for a soft-fork, James believes OP_VAULT is a worthwhile device to serve as a standard benchmark against which other proposals might be judged.
Updated on: 2023-05-22T23:20:27.036677+00:00