Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Recursive covenant opposition, or the absence thereof, was Re: TXHASH + CHECKSIGFROMSTACKVERIFY in lieu of CTV and ANYPREVOUT

From: Jeremy Rubin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2022 19:42:02 -0800

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 <[email-masked]> 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)
>
>