Hey Guy, did you fall down the Sapio rabbit hole as I did? Pretty interesting (and disturbing) stuff! 

Anyway, unless I’m missing something, it seems that you were misled on CTV’s capabilities. 

You said: “CTV doesn’t “enable smart contracts” in some elaborate way that isn’t already possible…”

Your statement is not true … straight from Jeremy Rubin himself:

“When we write a program in Sapio, we are designing an arbitrary state machine that can run any program.”

…and…

“As such, Sapio is a very powerful framework for designing Bitcoin smart contracts […].”

So CTV does provide a NEW powerful framework that allows ARBITRARY programs, which aren’t possible today. 

Jeremy even says at one point that you can write options contracts in Sapio. This confirms what I said about financial trading. 

Jeremy also says clearly that Sapio is ONLY POSSIBLE with CTV:

“CTV makes all this stuff really possible and without it it is severely limited in what contexts you’d want to be able to use it. …
Getting CTV adopted is really instrumental to making this vision that I showed you actually work.”

So, to recap:

You’ve said repeatedly that CTV was only providing capabilities that we have already. 

You said that CTV doesn’t provide “elaborate” new smart contract capabilities. 

You now have strong evidence that both of these statements are not true. 

Do you understand now why my earlier framing was accurate? If you’re still fuzzy on anything please let me know. 

Hoping you also understand better why I challenge these attempts to quickly change bitcoin’s core protocol. 

Of course I would love to have channel factories capable of opening a million lightning channels at once. But not if there is any risk to bitcoin. 

The problem is that none of us really know what OP_CTV can do. It seems this discussion is a perfect case in point. You’re super smart, incredibly well read, spending most of your time in this space, but still under the belief that OP_CTV just provides better hashing, stuff we already have. 

Nobody understands all the ways it can be abused, so nobody really understands what the risk to bitcoin really is. 

You think we need channel factories? Great! The dev community should explore how to add that without any “side effects”. We absolutely need vaults. Hopefully they can figure out how to get that done without side effects too. 

But adding arbitrary programs to the core protocol which could harm decentralization? No freaking way. We’ve seen that horror story play out on crypto blockchains.