Re: [bitcoin-dev] Unlimited covenants, was Re: CHECKSIGFROMSTACK/{Verify} BIP for Bitcoin

From: Billy Tetrud <billy.tetrud@gmail•com>
To: "David A. Harding" <dave@dtrt•org>,
	 Bitcoin Protocol Discussion
	<bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Unlimited covenants, was Re: CHECKSIGFROMSTACK/{Verify} BIP for Bitcoin
Date: Sun, 4 Jul 2021 13:50:43 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAGpPWDbUs01-Q=5F5Tw3biGwPRnH5kwNd6v=bdRGLG0HihqtXA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20210704203230.37hlpdyzr4aijiet@ganymede>

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I agree with you David. I think rather unconstrained covenants are
incredibly useful and important. Yes you can burn coins with them, you can
also permanently limit the usability of certain coins (which is less
destructive than burning them). But as Jeremy said, people are free to burn
their coins. People would also be free (in general) to reject coins
encumbered by weird government provisions or unknown provisions in hidden
scripts. A person/wallet shouldn't accept coins encumbered by scripts it
doesn't recognize.

Even if 99% of bitcoins became permanently encumbered by weird covenants,
the other 1% could still be plenty of bitcoins to run the economy, because
of its potentially infinite divisibility. Losing these coins, or someone
basically turning them into altcoin-like bitcoins shouldn't be a concern
really. What's the risk exactly? That people will be forced to take these
encumbered coins? A government can already force people to take whatever
altcoin they want to force on people - covenants don't make this worse.

Shinobi asks: "What if you extorted users with your 51% attack to move into
those?"

Well, you could do this anyway even without covenants existing already. The
51% attack could simply extort people to use whatever rules they want just
as easily (which isn't to say that easily - most users would probably
refuse to be extorted in either case). So I don't really think this is very
valid.

On Sun, Jul 4, 2021 at 1:33 PM David A. Harding via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 04, 2021 at 11:39:44AM -0700, Jeremy wrote:
> > However, I think the broader community is unconvinced by the cost benefit
> > of arbitrary covenants. See
> >
> https://medium.com/block-digest-mempool/my-worries-about-too-generalized-covenants-5eff33affbb6
> > as a recent example. Therefore as a critical part of building consensus
> on
> > various techniques I've worked to emphasize that specific additions do
> not
> > entail risk of accidentally introducing more than was bargained for to
> > respect the concerns of others.
>
> Respecting the concerns of others doesn't require lobotomizing useful
> tools.  Being respectful can also be accomplished by politely showing
> that their concerns are unfounded (or at least less severe than they
> thought).  This is almost always the better course IMO---it takes much
> more effort to satisfy additional engineering constraints (and prove to
> reviewers that you've done so!) than it does to simply discuss those
> concerns with reasonable stakeholders.  As a demonstration, let's look
> at the concerns from Shinobi's post linked above:
>
> They seem to be worried that some Bitcoin users will choose to accept
> coins that can't subsequently be fungibily mixed with other bitcoins.
> But that's already been the case for a decade: users can accept altcoins
> that are non-fungible with bitcoins.
>
> They talk about covenants where spending is controlled by governments,
> but that seems to me exactly like China's CBDC trial.
>
> They talk about exchanges depositing users' BTC into a covenant, but
> that's just a variation on the classic not-your-keys-not-your-bitcoins
> problem.  For all you know, your local exchange is keeping most of its
> BTC balance commitments in ETH or USDT.
>
> To me, it seems like the worst-case problems Shinobi describes with
> covenants are some of the same problems that already exist with
> altcoins.  I don't see how recursive covenants could make any of those
> problems worse, and so I don't see any point in limiting Bitcoin's
> flexibility to avoid those problems when there are so many interesting
> and useful things that unlimited covenants could do.
>
> -Dave
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