I’m glad Ark found a way forward without a soft fork. Let this be a lesson to anyone who thinks we NEED a fork to sCaLe bitcoin.
Discussion
bitcoin doesn't need any changes, and anyone who thinks it does is instantly suspicious
not only that, everything since segwit has been unnecessary... they only needed to add schnorr signatures to solve the malleability problem, from already back then, and i remember those times, and i weighed in somewhere about it, because i could see it, if my vote had been counted it was for schnorr signatures and not segwit
the result of segwit has been bloating of chain data exploited by malicious developers, it was never necessary
I concur
Covenants are pretty important for making many of these protocols non-interactive, so you don’t need to run a node to have self custody. Most people will not run nodes.
Sure you can *do it*, but if it’s too cumbersome and requires you to have a server running, this is not really solving anything.
But it is one more tool in the toolbox.
The more I read, the more I believe covenants to be worth the tradeoff of the additional complexity (and potential for unintended 2nd/3rd order effects).
How would covenants address self custody without running a node?
Covenants enable you to specify “how” coins can be spent vs traditionally just“who” can spend. This is done onchain at the bitcoin script level. bitcoin itself can enforce this, unlike needing to run nodes to monitor and create strike transactions, which we need to do now on lightning, ark, etc.
nostr:npub148jz5r9xujcjpqygk69yl4jqwjqmzgrqly26plktfjy8g4t7xaysj9xhgp did a good talk on this at the mit bitcoin expo if you want to understand the tradeoffs and why so many L2 devs want it for building better non-custodial protocols:
they don't, they are for governments to control you bitcoin spending
With the assumption most people wont or will be lazy to run a node. It is important to keep the urgency to run a node and promote it within the culture. Because that is the only way to create asymmetric momentum towards the small bunch that would end otherwise not doing anything and the byproduct is the slow sunset of node runners.
Keeping the pressure for people running a node is an important political and above all psychologic effort. It ensure there is continuity of new node runners as old ones also die as per life cycle.
Otherwise corporations and nation-states win de centralization game without even fighting.