Hi list,
Last year amid the failure of the CTV speedy trial activation and intense conversations about a rainbow of covenant proposals, I introduced the idea of a new community process to specify covenants [0]. This post is to resume the experiment so far and officially mark the process maintenance as "up for grabs", as I won't actively pursue it further (after wavering on such a decision a bit during May / June).
Few of the goals announced at that time were to build a consistent framework to evaluate covenant proposals, see the common grounds between proposals if they could be composed or combined by their authors, open the consensus changes development process beyond the historical boundaries of Bitcoin Core and maintain high-quality technical archive as a consensus discussions have spawned half a decade from intellectual conception to activation in average (at least for segwit, schnorr, taproot).
Such effort was a speak-by-the-act answer to the issues in consensus development changes pointed out by Jeremy Rubin in April of last year [1]: namely the lack of a "codified checklist" for consensus changes, that "consensus is memoryless" and "bitcoin core is not bitcoin" (independently of the technical concerns as I have as limited or non-adequate primitive for vaults / payment pools I expressed during the same time). Other complementary initiatives have been undertaken during the same period, AJ with the bitcoin-inquisition fork where the community of developers and contracting primitives of researchers on a consensus-enabled fork of core [2]. And Dave Harding with the careful archiving of all covenant proposals under the Optech umbrella [3].
About the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG, a Github repository was started and maintained to archive and document all the primitives (apo, tluv, ctv, the taproot annex, sighash_group, CSFS, cat, txhash, evict, check_output_covenant_verify, inherited ids, anyamount, singletons, op_vault) and the corresponding protocols (payment pools, vaults, drivechains, trust-minimized mining pools payouts). We had a total of 6 monthly meetings on the Libera chat #bitcoin-contracting-primitives-wg for a number of more than 20 individual attendees representing most of the parts of the community. I think (missing march logs). Numerous in-depth discussions did happen on the repository and on the channel on things like "merkelized all the things" or "payment pools for miners payoffs".
As I've been busy on the Lightning-side and other Bitcoin projects, I've not run an online meeting since the month of April, while still having a bunch of fruitful technical discussions with folks involved in the effort at conferences and elsewhere. I launched the effort as an experiment with the soft commitment to dedicate 20% of my time on it, after few successful sessions I think such a process has an interest of its own, however it comes with direct competition of my time to work on Lightning robustness. Getting my hands dirty on low-level LDK development recently made me realize we still have years of titan work to get a secure and reliable Lightning Network.
As such, between extended covenant capabilities for advanced contracts coming as a reality for Bitcoin _or_ LN working smoothly at scale with 50-100M UTXO-sharing users on it during the next 5-7 years cycle, I think the latter goal is more critical for Bitcoin existential survival, and where on a personal title I'll allocate the best of my time and energy (and somehow it match the "slow" technical activity on bitcoin-inquisition mostly done by Lightning hands).
This is my personal conclusion only on the state of Bitcoin technological momentum, and this is quite tainted by my deep background in Lightning development. If you've been working on covenant changes proposals, please don't take it as a discouragement, I think Taproot (privacy-preserving script policies behind the taproot tree branches) and Schnorr (for native multi-sig) soft forks have shown how it can improve the building of self-custody solutions by one or two order of magnitude, and small incremental changes might be good enough to have a lower technical consensus bar.
On my side, I'll pursue pure R&D works on CoinPool, notably coming with better solutions with the interactivity issue and mass-compression of withdrawal and design exotic advanced Bitcoin contracts based on the taproot annex, though more in a "l'art pour l'art" approach for the time being [4]. Additionally, I might start to submit an in-depth security review of consensus changes under pseudonyms, it has already been done in the past and somehow it's good practice in terms of "message neutrality" [5]. If folks wanna experiment in terms of payment pools deployment, Greg Maxwell's old joinpool can be used today (and somehow it's worthy of its own as a net advance for coinjoins).
I'll honestly acknowledge towards the community, I might have overpromised with the kickstart of this new process aiming to move the frontlines in matters of Bitcoin consensus changes development process. On the other hand, I think enough sessions of the working group have been runned and enough marks of technical interests have been collected to demonstrate the minimal value of such a process, so I would estimate my open-source balance sheet towards the community to be in good standing ? (open-minded question).
I don't think Bitcoin fundamentally lacks compelling technical proposals to advance the capabilities of Bitcoin Script today, nor the crowd of seasoned and smart protocol developers to evaluate mature proposals end-to-end and on multiple dimensions with a spirit of independence. Rather, I believe what Bitcoin is lacking is a small crowd of technical historians and archivist doing the work of assessing, collecting and preserving consensus changes proposals and QA devs to ensure any consensus change proposals has world-class battle-ground testing before to be considered for deployment, ideally with the best standards of Bitcoin decentralization and FOSS neutrality [6].
If you would like to pursue the maintenance and nurturing of the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG (or the bitcoin-inquisition fork or collaborate with Optech to organize industry-wise workshop on covenants at the image of what has been done in 2019 for Taproot), that you're willing to show proof-of-work and you estimate that operational ground, legal information or financial resources will anchor your individual work on the long-term, don't hesitate to reach out, I'll see what I can do with a disinterested mind [7].
With humility,
Antoine
[4] Version 0.2 of the CoinPool whitepaper addressing most of the remaining "Big Problems" is still pending on my visit to co-author Gleb Naumenko in Ukraine, which has been postponed few times in light of the conflict operational evolutions.
[6] Somehow I come to share Jeremy's thesis's "Product management is not "my Job" it's yours" in matters of consensus changes. I believe we might be past the technical complexity threshold where even simple consensus changes can be conducted from A to Z as a one man job or even by a group of 2/3 elite devs.
[7] I've been reached out multiple times and consistently by R&D non-profits, plebs whales and VC firms who were interested to commit resources to advance softforks and covenants in the Bitcoin space, no doubt when you're reliable and with a track record, folks are ready to offer you opportunities to work full-time on consensus changes.