I don't have a specific response to share at this moment, but I may make one later.

But for the sake of elevating the discourse, I'd encourage people responding this to read through https://rubin.io/bitcoin/2021/12/04/advent-7/ as I think it has some helpful terminology and categorizations.

I bring this up because I think that recursion is often given as a shorthand for "powerful" because the types of operations that support recursion typically also introduce open ended covenants, unless they are designed specially not to. As a trivial example a covenant that makes a coin spendable from itself to itself entirely with no authorization is recursive but fully enumerated in a sense and not particularly interesting or useful.

Therefore when responding you might be careful to distinguish if it is just recursion which you take issue with or open ended or some combination of properties which severally might be acceptable.

TL;DR there are different properties people might care about that get lumped in with recursion, it's good to be explicit if it is a recursion issue or something else.

Cheers,

Jeremy


On Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 4:55 PM David A. Harding <dave@dtrt.org> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 07, 2022 at 08:34:30PM -0800, Jeremy Rubin via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Whether [recursive covenants] is an issue or not precluding this sort
> of design or not, I defer to others.

For reference, I believe the last time the merits of allowing recursive
covenants was discussed at length on this list[1], not a single person
replied to say that they were opposed to the idea.

I would like to suggest that anyone opposed to recursive covenants speak
for themselves (if any intelligent such people exist).  Citing the risk
of recursive covenants without presenting a credible argument for the
source of that risk feels to me like (at best) stop energy[2] and (at
worst) FUD.

-Dave

[1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-July/019203.html
[2] http://radio-weblogs.com/0107584/stories/2002/05/05/stopEnergyByDaveWiner.html
    (thanks to AJ who told me about stop energy one time when I was
    producing it)