Oddbean

Yes, but it's a very neutered covenant (on purpose so it is not offensive but also not potent enough) and doesn't help with scaling or privacy or vaults, as far as I understand. Lightning devs need more. Other layer devs also need more (ARC, dark pools and other UTXO sharing protocols where the coordinator is much more trust minimized. CTV is very cool and can be upgraded in future, but we do need more if we are going to be able to scale without custodians. I'm a bit out of the loop with this and you should talk to Brandon as he understands this all deeply and has a gift for explaining it in simple terms.

CTV absolutely helps with scaling, privacy, and vaults in its simplest form. Multiple L2 designs and ideas can benefit from it. Obviously all of those things can be improved further with other op codes, but that’s exactly why I think we should implement and use CTV, that way we have a more direct idea of where it doesn’t meet everything we want. But CTV alone could make a symmetrical and much better LN design, it could alone create transaction pools, it could create a new type of “multisig” ownership that doesn’t actually expose the underlying parties, and that can be updated both cooperatively and exited unilaterally (kinda like channels but with many, rather than just 2, participants). Ark also would get the lightest single benefit by just having CTV. Again, it wouldn’t be the end all solution to everything? That’s not the point, it’s just the next step toward where we need to go. I think if we are constantly acting like we need to upgrade “everything we ever need” with the next soft fork, then the next one isn’t ever going to happen, because consensus on “everything we need” seems next to impossible. But a critical building block, that is safe, useful, and long tested feels like the best way to get a little bit closer to where we want to be.

In other words, i think trying to do everything is the impossible path when it comes to consensus, and also the wrong path when it comes to being conservative about the effects on Bitcoin. This isn’t a race, it’s a global foundation, I think one piece at a time, even if it takes 3x as long, is perfectly fine. We just need to get things moving, slow and steady