Covenant : a often formal, solemn, and binding settlement.
This phrase has turn out to be one of the vital charged phrases within the Bitcoin house. They’re the perfect factor since sliced bread. They’re essentially the most harmful factor for the reason that atom bomb. They aren’t actually going to do something to scale Bitcoin, however they’re neat.
Everybody has a totally totally different angle in direction of them. We’ve the pro-faction, the anti-faction, the ambivalent faction. To make issues worse, covenant is frankly a really obscure time period in its description of mature and concrete proposals to the protocol that may be labeled as covenants.
The levels of distinction between the performance of various proposals which were put ahead is gigantic. A few of them create completely new design areas for what it’s potential to construct on prime of Bitcoin, whereas others strictly talking don’t add any new performance in any respect, they merely optimize issues which might be already at present potential with a big diploma of complexity and overhead.
Let’s create a brand new definition particular to Bitcoin.
Covenant : any script that ensures some, or all, of the outputs created by a transaction spending an enter with a covenant script should match sure specified standards for the spending transaction to be consensus legitimate.
So in much less strict phrases, if a Bitcoin script at present restricts who can spend a coin by demanding an authorization proof, i.e. a cryptographic signature, or when it may be spent, i.e. after a timelock expires or the spender can present the preimage to a hash, a covenant script restricts how it may be spent, i.e. to who, how a lot to which particular person, and so forth. A covenant script may even prohibit a coin in order that it have to be spent to a different covenant script.
That final half is the core of what has made covenant such a contentious phrase. Many individuals have massive reservations about including a brand new option to “lock” bitcoins that may self-propagate and guarantee future cash are restricted similarly. Many individuals have issues about this getting used to break fungibility or institute censorship regimes.
I really feel it essential to level out that each of these items may be completed proper now, with no covenant script functionality, just by utilizing multisig. Any authority can refuse to permit withdrawals to be processed from exchanges until they’re to a 2-of-2 multisig the place that authority holds one key. From there they’ll merely refuse to signal transactions sending to addresses the place they don’t maintain a required key, and set up no matter blacklist or whitelist scheme they desired opaquely and completely off-chain.
That mentioned, it’s nonetheless vital for Bitcoin customers to have a grasp and understanding of the distinction of energy and adaptability between all of the totally different covenant proposals that at present exist.
There are two core issues that covenants search to allow in an effort to apply restrictions to how cash are spent, introspection and ahead information carrying.
Introspection is the flexibility to examine totally different components of the transaction that’s being evaluated whereas making an attempt to spend a selected coin. So as an illustration, if you wish to prohibit a coin in order that it needs to be spent to a selected tackle, you’ve gotten to have the ability to evaluate the tackle specified within the enter’s covenant script to the tackle specified within the output of the transaction spending it. Opcodes that allow introspection are ones that give us the flexibility to match totally different components of the spending transaction in opposition to restrictions included within the script being evaluated. The extra granular you will get with introspection regarding which explicit components of a transaction you possibly can study, the extra highly effective it turns into.
Ahead information carrying is said to introspection, and in some ways a consequence of it, that lets you guarantee some piece of knowledge is carried ahead and included in every new covenant script in order that it may be used within the subsequent analysis of the covenant script. That is completed by utilizing introspection to limit sure components of the transaction so tightly that they have to embrace the precise desired information or they’re invalid. The extra highly effective introspective functionality you’ve gotten, the extra flexibly you possibly can carry information ahead, and the extra flexibly you need to use that information.
That is simply the primary introduction to a sequence of articles to come back over the subsequent few weeks all the key covenant proposals which might be in a mature state, have obtained current curiosity, or are conceptually critically vital sufficient that builders agree on their usefulness however not but a concrete design. This gained’t be 100% full, however will probably be comparatively complete. Just a few of them additionally aren’t strictly covenants per se, however compose very tightly with them.
These will embrace:
- CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY
- CHECKSIGFROMSTACK
- TXHASH
- OP_VAULT
- CHECKCONTRACTVERIFY
- CAT
- TWEAKVERIFY