The covenants debate is essentially an argument over the risks of enabling arbitrary spending conditions in bitcoin consensus code. It's a sticky topic because everyone feels they must have an opinion but the risks and rewards are unknown or at least poorly understood by virtually everyone.

Even once you have done the work to uncover some unknown risks and make them known, you now face the unenviable task of explaining these new concepts to hostile parties exercising motivated reasoning.

How do you achieve unanimous consent under these conditions? It's an extremely hard thing to do. Every day feels like tilting against windmills while screaming into the void.

The covenant holy grail is something like OP_ZKP. This would let you compute anything that is computable, bundle up a proof in a concise little package, and put it on the blockchain for the whole world to verify.

AFAIK nobody is even speccing this out on bitcoin. It's too far off. Everybody is working on weaker proposals that have much more constrictive guardrails. Rightfully so, we can't afford to kill the goose that lays golden eggs.

Ecash avoids this debate because you don't need distributed consensus. We can build isolated digital cash islands that are entirely self-contained and interoperable with the larger bitcoin network. No blockchain necessary.

Abdel and friends just went out and built OP_ZKP for ecash mints. This is possible because in an ecash world consensus is localized to one party. The stakes are lower so builders can just build. Now you can do your arbitrary computations on a isolated digital cash islands. Users can manage their own risk by pegging in funds to mints they trust and withdrawing savings for on-chain storage. The wider bitcoin ecosystem doesn't need to involve themselves in what this mint is doing because the risk doesn't extend beyond the mint.

This is what decentralization looks like. Welcome to the future, y'all. BULLISH 😎