Oddbean

A lot of angst and pessimism on the timeline over the last 24 hours around the prospect of future upgrades to the Bitcoin protocol. TLDR; A number of highly technical people got together and apparently could not come to an agreement on the various tradeoffs of theoretical applications of covenants and associated OP codes. Frankly, this is the least surprising outcome anyone could have expected out of this type of exercise. Putting a bunch of gigabrain engineers into a room is not conducive to consensus. They will, by nature, try to outsmart one another. "You haven't considered this angle." "What if we approached it this way?" "There's a more efficient way." "Have you really thought through the implications?" Their drive to achieve the 'right' outcome fuels a race to devise "clever" solutions, each inevitably clashing with the alternatives. If you're wondering why you should care about this at all. It's because most people involved do agree that multi-party on-chain contracts are necessary to achieve true scale. The limitations of two-party Lightning channels are increasingly obvious hence the interest in optimizing the flow of capital around the network across larger hubs of individuals sharing UTXOs. Unfortunately, the lack of first-hand experience with covenant-based constructs is allowing everyone’s imagination to run wild. We are all attempting to optimize for the end game with little to no appreciation for the present situation. Some have devised clever ways to implement zero-knowledge technology using Bitcoin script. Others are designing coin pool protocols that can potentially withstand the mass exit of hundreds of thousands of users without catastrophic economic consequences. All of them are frustrated others can't seem to be as excited as them about their progress. Meanwhile, a credible opportunity to further our common understanding of multi-party contracts is staring everyone in the face: the Ark protocol. Unsurprisingly, most every one of these very competent individuals have their own opinions of it. "The liquidity requirements are too high." "It can't possibly work without covenants." "Fees and unilateral exit scenarios are tricky." Again, not only only are these experts seemingly fixated on perfecting the 'right' outcome, but at times it feels like they’re trying to control it. My advice to everyone involved: let go of this obsession with perfection and embrace the good. There are now two teams iterating through various ways to implement Ark in ways that can solve real problems, TODAY. Sure, Ark as originally proposed and as currently implemented is not yet the ubiquitous payment grail it was originally propped up as. A lot of different adversarial scenarios will challenge the different use cases vying to leverage it, but if you give it honest consideration, you will realize it is MUCH more practical than some would want you to believe. It does not need to immediately find its way into retail user wallets to have a massive impact on the current Bitcoin payment infrastructure. Various existing sets of counterparties should be able to use Ark as a simple and straightforward way to amortize the cost of their on-chain operations. And if all you care about is to achieve pie-in-the-sky perfection then there is probably no better alternative as we speak to gain real world economic feedback on the behavior of users of those future protocols. If you want to accelerate the development of technology that will directly inform the design of future covenant-based evolutions, I believe there is no better way to funnel your energy today than to participate in the conversation, contribute and start building on Ark. Join us! https://arkdev.info