Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Merkleize All The Things

From: Bram Cohen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2022 15:34:32 -0800

On Tue, Nov 8, 2022 at 2:13 AM Salvatore Ingala via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:

>
> I have been working on some notes to describe an approach that uses
> covenants in order to enable general smart contracts in bitcoin. You can
> find them here:
>
>     https://merkle.fun/
> <https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev>
>

Hash chained covenants in general all have about the same plateau of
functionality, which seems roughly reasonable to add to Bitcoin as it is
today but suffer from being limited and hence likely only a stepping stone
to greater functionality and unless whatever's put in now cleanly extends
to supporting more in the future it's likely to turn into a legacy
appendage which has to be supported. So my generic suggestion for this sort
of thing is that it should be proposed along with a plan for how it could
be extended to support full-blown covenants in the future.

Another probably unhelpful bit of feedback I have is that Bitcoin should
probably be taking verkle trees seriously because those can have
substantially lower size/cost/weight than merkle trees. That doesn't just
apply to this proposal, but to Bitcoin in general, which doesn't seem to
have any serious verkle tree proposals to date.