Author: Antoine Riard 2023-07-20 05:33:58+00:00
Published on: 2023-07-20T05:33:58+00:00
In a discussion regarding the claim that advanced contracting capabilities can improve the Lightning Network, the sender supports this claim by referring to ideas about payment pools published in 2020. They highlight the limitations of 2-party payment channels in terms of privacy and scalability dimensions. The sender acknowledges discussions on the trade-off of hashchain covenants like CTV in terms of off-chain constructions, considering factors such as key management, fee cost, liquidity, counterparty interactivity, and security risks. While they are unsure if Bitcoin needs covenant schemes in the long term, they recognize that certain covenants, particularly those enhancing payment pools or channel factories and self-custody solutions, increase the chances of Bitcoin's survival. The sender mentions that proving the formal necessity of covenants would require reducing Bitcoin and its related systems to a workable game-theory and defining it based on practical assumptions. Regarding the latest claim that Lightning might benefit from a covenant primitive, the sender believes it is difficult to evaluate due to ongoing changes in channel operations. However, they note that covenant primitives might be useful in the "high-level" Lightning system. The sender also mentions the limitations of signatures compared to CTV-like "hash-chain" in financial engineering expressivity. They refer to past experimentation with DLC integration in LDK but have not evaluated the practical performance bounds of curve points addition for expressing advanced contracts. Finally, the sender makes references to various sources supporting their points.
Updated on: 2023-08-11T15:35:07.209482+00:00