Subject: [bitcoin-dev] TXHASH + CHECKSIGFROMSTACKVERIFY in lieu of CTV and ANYPREVOUT

From: "Russell O'Connor" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2022 12:20:10 -0500

Recapping the relationship between CTV and ANYPREVOUT::

It is known that there is a significant amount of overlap in the
applications that are enabled by the CTV and ANYPREVOUT proposals despite
the fact that their primary applications (congestion control for CTV and
eltoo lightning channels for ANYPREVOUT) are quite distinct.
In particular, ANYPREVOUT can enable most of the applications of CTV,
albeit with a higher cost.  The primary functionality of CTV is to allow a
scriptPubKey to make a commitment to its spending transaction's hash with
the input's TXID excluded from the hash.  This exclusion is necessary
because the scriptPubKey is hashed into the input's TXID, and including the
TXID would cause a cycle of hash commitments, which is impossible to
construct.  On the other hand, ANYPREVOUT defines a signature hash mode
that similarly excludes the inputs TXID for its purpose of rebindable
signatures.

This means that ANYPREVOUT can mimic most of the properties of CTV by
committing both a public key along with an ANYPREVOUT signature inside
scriptPubKey.  In fact, the only reason Bitcoin doesn't have covenants
today is due to this cycle between scriptPubKeys and the TXIDs that occur
in all the sighash modes.

The major differences between simulating CTV via ANYPREVOUT and the actual
CTV proposal is: (1) The cost of simulating CTV.  With CTV the spending
transaction is committed using a hash of 32 bytes, while simulating it with
ANYPREVOUT requires 64 bytes for a signature, and 32 bytes for some public
key, plus a few more bytes for various flags.  Some of that cost could be
reduced by using the inner public key (1 byte representation) and, if we
had CAT, maybe by assembling the signature from reusable pieces (i.e.
setting the nonce of the commited signature equal to the public key).

The other major difference is: (2) CTV's transaction hash covers values
such as the number of inputs in the transaction and their sequence numbers,
which ANYPREVOUT does not cover.  CTV's hash contains enough information so
that when combined with the missing TXIDs, you can compute the TXID of the
spending transaction.  In particular if the number of inputs is committed
to being 1, once the scriptpubkey's transaction id is known and committed
to the blockchain, the TXID of its spending transaction is deducible.  And
if that transaction has outputs that have CTV commitments in them, you can
deduce their spending TXIDs in turn.  While this is a pretty neat feature,
something that ANYPREVOUT cannot mimic, the main application for it is
listed as using congestion control to fund lightning channels, fixing their
TXIDs in advance of them being placed on chain.  However, if ANYPREVOUT
were used to mimic CTV, then likely it would be eltoo channels that would
be funded, and it isn't necessary to know the TXIDs of eltoo channels in
advance in order to use them.

An Alternative Proposal::

Given the overlap in functionality between CTV and ANYPREVOUT, I think it
makes sense to decompose their operations into their constituent pieces and
reassemble their behaviour programmatically.  To this end, I'd like to
instead propose OP_TXHASH and OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACKVERIFY.

OP_TXHASH would pop a txhash flag from the stack and compute a (tagged)
txhash in accordance with that flag, and push the resulting hash onto the
stack.
OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACKVERIFY would pop a pubkey, message, and signature from
the stack and fail if the signature does not verify on that message.

CTV and TXHASH have roughly equivalent functionality.  'CTV DROP' can be
simulated by '<ctv_style_flag> TXHASH EQUALVERIFY'.  The reverse is also
true where '<ctv_style_flag> TXHASH' can be simulated by CTV by
'<ctv-result-from-witness-stack> CTV', however, as you can see, simulating
TXHASH from CTV is much more expensive than the other way around, because
the resulting 32-byte hash result must be included as part of the witness
stack.

'<anyprevout-pubkey> CHECKSIGVERIFY can be simulated by '<apo_style_flag>
TXHASH <pubkey> CHECKSIGFROMSTACKVERIFY'.  Here we see the advantage of
pushing the hash value onto the stack.  APO can be simulated without
needing to include a copy of the resulting txhash inside the witness data.

In addition to the CTV and ANYPREVOUT applications, with
CHECKSIGFROMSTACKVERIFY we can verify signatures on arbitrary messages
signed by oracles for oracle applications.  This is where we see the
benefit of decomposing operations into primitive pieces.  By giving users
the ability to program their own use cases from components, we get more
applications out of fewer op codes!

Caveats::

First, I acknowledge that replicating the behaviour of CTV and ANYPREVOUT
does cost a few more bytes than using the custom purpose built proposals
themselves.  That is the price to be paid when we choose the ability to
program solutions from pieces.  But we get to reap the advantages of being
able to build more applications from these pieces.

Unlike CTV, TXHASH is not NOP-compatable and can only be implemented within
tapscript.  In particular, bare CTV isn't possible with this proposal.
However, this proposal doesn't preclude the possibility of having CTV added
to legacy script in while having TXHASH added to tapscript.

For similar reasons, TXHASH is not amenable to extending the set of txflags
at a later date.  In theory, one could have TXHASH abort-with-success when
encountering an unknown set of flags.  However, this would make analyzing
tapscript much more difficult. Tapscripts would then be able to abort with
success or failure depending on the order script fragments are assembled
and executed, and getting the order incorrect would be catastrophic.  This
behavior is manifestly different from the current batch of OP_SUCCESS
opcodes that abort-with-success just by their mere presence, whether they
would be executed or not.

I believe the difficulties with upgrading TXHASH can be mitigated by
designing a robust set of TXHASH flags from the start.  For example having
bits to control whether (1) the version is covered; (2) the locktime is
covered; (3) txids are covered; (4) sequence numbers are covered; (5) input
amounts are covered; (6) input scriptpubkeys are covered; (7) number of
inputs is covered; (8) output amounts are covered; (9) output scriptpubkeys
are covered; (10) number of outputs is covered; (11) the tapbranch is
covered; (12) the tapleaf is covered; (13) the opseparator value is
covered; (14) whether all, one, or no inputs are covered; (15) whether all,
one or no outputs are covered; (16) whether the one input position is
covered; (17) whether the one output position is covered; (18) whether the
sighash flags are covered or not (note: whether or not the sighash flags
are or are not covered must itself be covered).  Possibly specifying which
input or output position is covered in the single case and whether the
position is relative to the input's position or is an absolute position.

That all said, even if other txhash flag modes are needed in the future,
adding TXHASH2 always remains an option.

Interactions with potential future opcodes::

We should give some consideration on how these opcodes may interact with
future opcodes such as CAT, rolling SHA256 opcodes, or how it might
interface with other covenant opcodes that may do things like, directly
push input or output amounts onto the stack for computation purposes,
opcodes which have been added to the Elements project.

With CAT and/or rolling SHA256 opcodes and/or existing SHA256 opcodes, the
CHECKSIGFROMSTACKVERIFY could verify signatures on programmatically
assembled messages.  Also, in combination with multiple calls to TXHASH,
could be used to create signatures that commit to complex subsets of
transaction data.

If new opcodes are added to push parts of the transaction data direction
onto the stack, e.g. OP_INSPECTOUTPUTVALUE, there is perhaps concern that
they would obsolete TXHASH, since, in the presence of rolling SHA256
opcodes, TXHASH could be simulated.  However, given that TXHASH can
compactly create a hash of large portions of transaction data, it seems
unlikely that TXHASH would fall into disuse.  Also, a combination of TXHASH
and transaction introspection opcodes can be used to build "*subtractive
covenants*".

The usual way of building a covenant, which we will call "*additive *
*covenants*", is to push all the parts of the transaction data you would
like to fix onto the stack, hash it all together, and verify the resulting
hash matches a fixed value.  Another way of building covenants, which we
will call "*subtractive covenants*", is to push all the parts of the
transaction data you would like to remain free onto the stack.  Then use
rolling SHA256 opcodes starting from a fixed midstate that commits to a
prefix of the transaction hash data. The free parts are hashed into that
midstate.  Finally, the resulting hash value is verified to match a value
returned by TXHASH.  The ability to nicely build subtractive covenants
depends on the details of how the TXHASH hash value is constructed,
something that I'm told CTV has given consideration to.