What changed your mind? A listen or read you could share?
Discussion
After listening to Shinobi a while back on a podcast, I came to understand that covenants allow denser use of block space (sharing UTXOs) and that without this, people holding keys on chain would necessarily be a minority of users.
In such a world, as more people want to use Bitcoin, theyâll have to fall back on custodial solutions. I heard Francis of Bull Bitcoin talking on a pod about Liquid being a possible solution. Iâve heard Livera talk about fedimints. Iâve seen people using eCash lately. People buying into ETFs. etc. etc.
We must not give up on peer-to-peer cash. If we cede to banks, weâre guaranteed to get diluted by IOUs and risk centralization (as happened with fiat currency).
We canât stop people from using custodians. But if we donât continue to densify, we guarantee that they will.
I can see the push for data density as you state... Could it be used in the opposite way though?? Like what we saw with ordinals?
Good question. First, a point of order: Taproot did not enable Ordinals. Ordinals were first invented in 2012 under the name âcolored coinsâ. Ordinals is just a rebrand of an old idea using modern OP codes.
From the perspective of regular users like us, Ordinal transactions are merely space-inefficient. That is, they use way more block space than strictly necessary to transfer sats. Wasting block space is possible no matter what features are enabled/removed.
But then again, waste is in the eye of the beholder. A multisig transaction uses more block space than a single sig transaction. From the single sig enjoyerâs perspective, multisig users are wasting block space.
Whether transactions are block-space efficient or not, they must be FEE-efficient. Every transaction, to be mined at all, must outcompete lower-fee transactions. Block space is pay-to-play.
And thankfully so! The fee market is what keeps Bitcoin censorship resistant. A censored party can increase their offered fee until itâs irresistible to some miner to take. Miners that censor pay for their prejudice in lost revenue.
So having said all that, your question is whether covenants, while designed to increase space efficiency, could be used to instead to create space-inefficient transactions (Ordinals, etc.). I must admit that since any feature of Bitcoinâs locking script could be used inefficiently, it stands to reason that someone could use covenant OP codes in this way.
Would an Ordinal developer be likely to do so? My guess would be ânoâ, because there are better (less inefficient) ways of encoding their garbage than trying to shoehorn a covenant OP for this purpose.