Author: Jeremy 2021-07-02 22:32:24
Published on: 2021-07-02T22:32:24+00:00
Bitcoin developer Jeremy Rubin has published a blog post discussing potential upgrades to Bitcoin and their impact on the next generation of stateful smart contracts. The post covers four proposals: SH_APO (BIP-118), OP_CAT, OP_CSFS, and OP_CTV (BIP-119). Each upgrade is discussed in detail, including its use cases and design questions. Rubin provides a comparative analysis of the upgrades across several dimensions, such as design specificity. Rubin hopes to foster discussion around potential new features, risk minimization, and pragmatic design for Bitcoin. While this is not an official roadmap or prioritization, the article discusses the safety and potential benefits of the proposed upgrades. Rubin ranks the upgrades in terms of safety, with CTV being the safest and CAT being the least safe due to its potential for unintended functionality.The author suggests pairings of upgrades that can work together to deliver more advanced smart contract functionality, such as arbitrary covenants. Rubin recommends implementing the upgrades in the following order: CTV, CSFS, APO, and CAT. This approach represents a gradual relaxation of Bitcoin's restrictions around smart contract programming that introduces useful, safe primitives and gives the community time to build and deploy useful infrastructure.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T23:56:19.022484+00:00