Author: Michael Folkson 2022-07-23 14:25:15
Published on: 2022-07-23T14:25:15+00:00
In an email to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Antoine Riard proposed a new covenant open specification process for Bitcoin. Riard believes that no consensus has been reached on any new set of contracting primitives satisfying the requirements of known covenant-enabled use-cases. As long as participants understand and agree that no process can guarantee community consensus, the proposed covenant process has the potential to move research forward in a positive direction. The range of Script primitives proposed during the last years has grown large and extends the range of workable multi-party contract protocols. Riard states that the task of technical evaluation of any covenant proposal sounds at least two-fold. There is first reasoning about the enabled protocols on a range of criteria such as scalability, efficiency, simplicity, extensibility, robustness, data confidentiality, etc. The second step is to evaluate how good a fit is a proposed Script primitive, the efficiency/simplicity/ease to use trade-offs, but also if there are no functionality overlap or hard constraints on the use-cases design themselves or evolvability w.rt future Script extensions or generalization of the opcode operations. Riard proposes regular meetings, an open agenda where topics of discussion can be pinned in advance and documentation artifacts would be built with time driven by consensus. He suggests that the starting date could be September / October / November (later, 2023 ? ). Riard believes with any discussion about covenants or other soft forks, the hard part isn't about coming up with the best technical solution to a set of problems but in the iterative process where all voices are listened to reach (or not) consensus on what is actually meant by "best" and if the problems are accurate.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T23:07:42.955249+00:00