> They open the door to future mining centralization.
Can you elaborate on how they increase mining centralization?
From what I can see, CTV actually reduces mining centralization, by making trustless coordination-free mining pools possible. Since coinbase transaction can be constructed to send funds directly to a covenant that miners can later claim their funds from in a trustless manner, it'll dramatically reduce the reliance on pool operators for larger miners.
https://utxos.org/uses/miningpools/
> Maybe someday there will be an existential scaling crisis, but we don’t have one right now. The mempool is clearing at a few sats/vbyte.
You could make the argument that the mempool is clearing at a few sats/vB because not enough people are actually practicing self-custody. Most of the activity is on centralized exchanges or ETFs. Vaults make self-custody way more feasible and safe.
> There are also alternatives that devs haven’t yet explored. We should exhaust all reasonable alternatives before proposing a core protocol change.
Yes that is true for covenants. You can "technically" simulate a covenant on Bitcoin today by locking UTXOs with a key that must be provably destroyed. Before destroying the key, you presign the unvaultiong transaction with the spending paths you wish for the covenant.
But let's be honest, the concept of needing to literally provably destroy the private key is an incredibly terrible process prone to error. And relying entirely on pre-signed transactions to get your funds back is just terrible as well. Instead of having to backup seed phrase, you need to back up pre-signed txs.
> We should instead identify key use cases (vaults?) that are absolutely essential (that can only be solved with a core protocol change) and build specific solutions, scoped as narrowly as possible to prevent unintentional side effects.
Ironically the solution that enables effective vaults (OP_VAULT) relies on OP_CTV support
IMO risks for CTV are very well defined, and every action commited to in CTV is well defined as well
Good points.
Covenants 'open the door' to doing a whole range of things *trustlessly* or *efficiently* that are currently already being done inefficiently and/or with trusted third parties...
Absolutely 🎯
This thread contains even more discussion on the topic: 👇
And generally covenants using CTV open the door to doing a whole range of things *trustlessly* and *efficiently* in a very clear and understandable manner that doesn't leave room for unknown unknowns being introduced (especially compared to CAT). Commiting to ALL inputs and outputs reduces the attack vectors substantially IMO.
nostr:note1unr7mt6w06lax85e59dyyt9gc3mcth34sy4rue26f297rlkk64yss6sz7k
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