Author: Andrew Poelstra

Whereas the final 12 months or two have seen plenty of proposals for covenant-proposing extensions to Bitcoin, there has all the time been a suspicion amongst specialists that covenants could also be potential with out any extensions. Proof for this has are available in two types: an increasing repertoire of previously-thought-impossible computations in Script (culminating within the BitVM’s challenge to implement each RISC-V opcode), and a sequence of “near-misses” by which Bitcoin builders have discovered ways in which covenants would have been potential, if not for some obscure historic quirk of the system.Ethan Heilman, Avihu Levy, Victor Kobolov and I’ve…