On the experiment of the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG and marking this community process "up for grabs"

Summary:

In an email exchange between Keagan McClelland and Antoine Riard on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Keagan expressed his belief that the complexity of current lightning (LN) proposals can be simplified using CheckTemplateVerify (CTV) and other covenant schemes. He argued that covenants are not a distraction from LN development but rather a significant contribution to its maturity. However, he acknowledged that the prioritization of covenants in LN is still uncertain. Keagan also mentioned his long-standing support for the addition of covenant mechanisms in Bitcoin as a necessary step for its long-term survival.Antoine, in his response, announced that he would no longer actively pursue the community process of specifying covenants. He summarized the goals of this process, which included building a consistent framework for evaluating covenant proposals, expanding the consensus changes development process beyond Bitcoin Core, and maintaining a high-quality technical archive. Antoine highlighted the importance of focusing on the smooth functioning of the Lightning Network at scale with a large number of users sharing UTXOs. He acknowledged the value of incremental changes in consensus and expressed his personal commitment to working on Lightning robustness.Antoine also mentioned the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives Working Group, which aimed to document and discuss various covenant primitives and protocols. While he had not been able to run online meetings regularly due to his commitments in Lightning development, he believed that enough progress had been made to demonstrate the value of such a process. Antoine expressed his belief that what Bitcoin needed was a group of technical historians and archivists to assess, collect, and preserve consensus changes proposals, as well as QA developers to ensure thorough testing before deployment.In conclusion, Antoine invited interested individuals to take over the maintenance and nurturing of the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG or collaborate with other initiatives like bitcoin-inquisition and Optech. He emphasized the need for proof-of-work, long-term commitment, and available resources to drive these efforts forward.

Updated on: 2023-07-22T02:06:55.816598+00:00