Nostr Web Client

More generally, I agree with James' observation that Bitcoin Core devs are paying much less attention to soft forks than they used to.

I can only speak for myself here. Part of the problem is that the current proposals don't excite me, yet. That's even after spending time at the op_next conference.

SegWit (which happened before I was involved) brought the promise of Lightning. Taproot lets you build cold storage with hidden fallback options.

I'm still waiting for MuSig2 to finally have broad adoption, something that's higher on my review list than new soft forks, and I barely get to it.

In that light, talk of a vault soft fork seems premature. The tool development is too far behind even for forks that already activated.

Similarly congestion control doesn't excite me. I'm general I'm skeptical of claims that the masses are suddenly going to self-custody because of a dramatic event in US politics. Especially given that plenty of other countries are in worse shape and we don't see self custody blossom at a scale where it causes congestion. The US is 5% of the world population.

That's not to say that I'm against these ideas. If I see other people work on and activate them in a competent and careful manner I might be fine with it. It's sad that their main proponents and developers burned out, and that certainly won't speed things up. Maybe grants tailored for potential soft fork devs can help here, as long as the right expectations are set.

But not being opposed does not reach the bar of me actively reviewing it, which is part of what pushes things forward.

If I see a more fleshed out design for a (BitVM powered?) sidechain with unilateral (no 1 of N nonsense) exit that gives me full privacy (Shielded CSV?), that would get me more excited. Especially if it's clear which specific opcodes are best to get there.

Other devs will have other things and other thresholds that get them out of their soft-fork winter sleep. There's a "I know it when I see it" aspect to this too.

All that said, it might be the case that one day every single core dev is excited about a soft fork proposal, or would be if they read enough about it, yet is too distracted by their day to day focus. But I'm not sure if that is really what's happening. nostr:note1579fauj8nwl38mvzle5fkupswjw6fkzqv4syupav8ckshujy24tsks9y3h

DireMunchkin 1y ago

Agreed, especially on the false urgency. I do think vaults are cool as a final get-out-of-jail card to prevent my stack from getting stolen. But we can spend a few more years hashing out covenant proposals IMO.

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Discussion

Sjors Provoost 1y ago

Vaults are useful to prevent your hot (or luke warm) coins from being stolen. They give you a button to send money to cold storage.

Using them toto protect your cold storage is trickier, because then where do you send the coins? What if you fallback cold storage actually has worse security?

There are more subtle ways in which you can use vaults as a dead man switch, which current requires moving your UTXO's on a regular interval.

Rusty Russell 1y ago

Vault to a custodian makes sense. In an emergency, you use that dormant Coinbase acct. They don't even know that's why you have it!

But in general, I see OP_VAULT and go "why can't Script do that?". Explicit opcodes for uses strike me as premature optimization or a throwing up of hands on Script as a programming language. I want to fix that, even though I'm unlikely to use vaults.