Replying to Wonteet Zebugs

My understanding is that CTV enables vaults. In terms of adversarial thinking, how do you feel about the risks of CTV making it easier for governments to mandate vaults, including time delays and recovery mechanisms? And the risks of having siloed bitcoins ?

Those are my main concerns with CTV, on top of the unknown unknowns of a consensus change. I'm pretty much 110% in, so I care! ;-)
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vnprc 7mo ago

CTV is a prerequisite to vaults but does not alone enable ergonomic vaults.

Vaults are not a threat to bitcoiners. Governments cannot mandate the spending conditions of your self-custodial bitcoin. This is because your wallet software specifies the locking conditions for a UTXO when it creates the receive address. If you use self-sovereign wallet software (you should) then you are not vulnerable to malicious spending conditions injected into your wallet addresses.

If your argument is that governments can force you to use a particular wallet with malicious spending conditions, this is already possible with multisig. It doesn't happen in practice because governments don't need to do that much work. It is FAR easier to push people into custodial systems. Coinbase, Microstrategy, and bitcoin ETFs are the actual attack on bitcoin self-custody, not CTV.

CTV is an extremely useful tool to have in the toolbox. It is safe and brings amazing capabilities to bitcoin script. Quite frankly, we should have activated it on mainnet years ago. The best time to plant a tree is 100 years ago but the second best time is right now.

Let's activate this thing already.

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Wonteet Zebugs 7mo ago

This is what I replied to nerd2ninja and I think it applies to your answer as well :

Those are more extreme, thus harder to mandate. And they don't affect the rest of the bitcoin UTXOs.

- If someone in some dictatorship is forced to use a custodian there, it doesn't affect others, and that guy can leave his country.

- Mandating a multi-sig would force the government to have lots of policies in place to be able to sign (or not) for every spend. A policy nightmare.

Whereas if we have vaults that can be mandated, you risk having siloed UTXOs on the network. It's also much easier to just have some kind of vault where the government gives itself a 72 hours to clawback a spend if they realize you're sending it to a Unacceptable Fringe Opinion Holder.

I see vaults as much more dangerous than what the governments can actually enforce right now with the protocol as it is.