Can someone explain for we mortals what these do?
OK, hot off the keyboard! Here are my first pass series of 4 BIPS:
1. Varops Budget For Script Runtime Constraint
2. Restoration of disabled script functionality (Tapscript v2)
3. OP_TX
4. New Opcodes for Taproot v2
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/compare/master...rustyrussell:bips:guilt/varops
I took this week off to work on these, so I can post them to the ML and we can start proper discussion. But I figured I might as well share early drafts here! Especially since I am sometimes so "in the weeds" that I forget what questions normal developers might have, looking at all these words...
Discussion
Satoshi originally created fully programmable money: a little programming language attached to each coin! But it was buggy and had to be disabled :(
We've pushed what's left as about as far as it can go, but rebuilding it (without the bugs!) is a lot of work. Still, someone had to try, right?
As to what it can do, there are a lot of technical answers. But the real answer is: *whatever people dream of in the future*. When we design a new computer chip, most of the software it will run *doesn't exist yet*, so we simply build it as powerful and flexible as we can.
This is the promise of programmable money: you can control your coins without requiring my approval, or even my understanding. And I want that in the world!