content warning: nerdy bitcoin thoughts after a day of btcplusplus.dev

If we had some form of covenants we could have hundreds of L2s instead of just a few that barely work. Covenants are not spooky. They just mean being able to look at information of the transaction in the script that unlocks bitcoin for spending.

Before I didn’t really care about transaction introspection but many smarter bitcoiners are starting to convince me otherwise.

We could have channel factories that would solve many lightning onboarding problems, not to mention replacing the “i steal all your money because you restored from backup wrong” to “i just fix the channel state”.

It would also enable non-interactive versions of Ark and would open up tons of potentially more efficient L2s that make onboarding onto bitcoin easier and safer.

With op_txhash and other introspection proposals you could do “stacking”, a way for anyone to take a bunch of transactions and make a more efficient bundle translation to reduce fees, which will be increasingly important when fees get higher. This can be seen as a less hacky way to do sighash flags.

rusty’s great script restoration with a proper op budget has played a huge role in my shift of thinking, things like op_cat can be re-enabled, fixing the concerns which prompted satoshi to disable it at the last minute.

You can bizarrely get introspection from op_cat itself in a super inefficient way, but if we end up fixing script ideally we would just do something smarter like #lnhance

I can’t help but thinking of the future risks to bitcoin in a high fee environment if we don’t have tools to deal with it.

This is all theoretical of course, as engineers all we can do is come up with the best possible solution, ultimately its up to the node runners if they think its worth the opportunity to fix these problems.