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

From: Billy Tetrud <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2022 10:18:55 -0600

> If Drivechains are bad for whatever reason, we should not add recursive
covenants.

Bad "for who" was the crux of my question to you. Even if drivechains are
always bad for their users, I don't think that's a good enough reason to
block things that could allow people to build user-space drivechains, as
long as it doesn't negatively affect normal Bitcoin users.

> Drivechains are not a scaling solution

I generally agree, more of a laboratory where many things (including
scaling solutions) can be tested.

> Principle of Least Power.
A concern is that, since it turns out recursive covenants are sufficient to
implement Drivechains, recursive covenants may also enable *other*
techniques, currently unknown, which may have negative effects on Bitcoin,
or which would be considered undesirable by a significant section of the
userbase.

I think the principle of least power is a good one, but it cannot be dogma.
I think your point about unknown consequences is reasonable and a study on
that kind of thing would be quite valuable. The community has discussed it
multiple times in the past, and so at least some thought has gone into it,
with nothing very strong in opposition that I know of. Has anyone made a
good summary/study of the kinds of things recursive covenants allows?

On Sat, Feb 26, 2022, 02:35 Prayank via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> Good morning ZmnSCPxj,
>
> > Of course, I know of no such technique, but given that a technique
> (Drivechains) which before would have required its own consensus change,
> turns out to be implementable inside recursive covenants, then I wonder if
> there are other things that would have required their own consensus change
> that are now *also* implementable purely in recursive covenants.
>
>
> Agree. I would be interested to know what is NOT possible once we have
> recursive covenants.
>
> > if there is *now* consensus that Drivechains are not bad, go ahead, add
> recursive covenants (but please can we add `SIGHASH_NOINPUT` and `OP_CTV`
> first?)
>
>
> Agree and I think everything can be done in separate soft forks.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Prayank
>
> A3B1 E430 2298 178F
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