Oddbean

I have now read Peter Todd's review on Bitcoin L2's and covenants and found it incredibly underwhelming. Even though the title is "review" I wasn't expecting it to be really just a review. It basically contains no new insights or analyses, actually it refrains from commenting on most topics based on the fact that "there has been no analyses of this" and then it just proceeds to provide descriptions of things that should have already been known by anyone who did a little bit of research into any of the topics. While reading the essay you get the impression that all L2s are bad and no soft-forks are worth doing, but then in the end it does some sleigh of hands and concludes that CTV is great just because it is the highest common denominator among all the pool of uselessness described previously.

I took it as what it seemed to be; A collection and breakdown of the main proposals out there. I was disappointed that the ones I knew least about and were curious to finally get some solid info on, were basically addressed with “there’s no strong analysis of this, so we won’t cover it anymore.” However, I also took this as a way to get a lot of people on the same page or “caught up” so to speak. I wasn’t really thinking that anyone who looked into each of these individually would be gaining a ton of new info from it.

The risk that proponents never address is that these proposals could harm the decentralization of bitcoin’s mining. Changes to bitcoin’s core protocol must be both safe and necessary. We can’t take unnecessary risks with the world’s money and our hope for the future. Devs should use these proposed features first on Liquid (where mining centralization is not a concern) and then only propose them for bitcoin if they are truly necessary.

A general review article. Soft-Fork/Covenant Dependent Layer 2 Review https://petertodd.org/2024/covenant-dependent-layer-2-review nostr:note1wq8qlz9x3mj6r3ex3tlepwdzwxya3eqfq96cu3jqmcgljr4swgwsafdfd4