Nostr Web Client

So it basically enables scripting?

What *doesn’t* it enable? The scope of OP_CAT and what it can do seems so arbitrarily large as to make discussion of it difficult. Not to mention developing with it is unintuitive and creates very complex scripts for very simple functions.

Everything I’ve seen suggests it is a recipe for messy development, technical debt, long term bugs/faults that aren’t obvious at the outset, and an avalanche of scams that aren’t secure, decentralized, or anything else we care about but that bring the “crypto” world flooding into Bitcoin selling the same garbage with a fresh coat of paint.

If you have a different perspective and can argue it, be my guest, I’m happy to learn something.

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Discussion

crany 👽🧡🗿 1y ago

you sold me at 'conservatism' and the diligence and patience to deeply consider a major change

jimbocoin 🃏 1y ago

I have a less-pessimistic appraisal of OP_CAT. Yes, it enables more use-cases. Like anything, there are costs and benefits.

What I like about it, personally, is that the additional flexibility provides space for developers/users to defend against attacks. It may enable new and better CoinJoin solutions to mask transactions from censors. It could provide novel vault solutions. It opens up alternative signature schemes potentially with better properties for some kinds of attacks. Defense against a discovered weakness in ECDSA for example.

However, OP_CAT solutions tend to be costlier for the user than the would-be alternatives. An OP_CAT vault will take more bytes than an OP_VAULT TX for instance. But this is OK. Someone who wants the expensive functionality can pay for the bytes. If that type of transaction becomes popular, we can always fork in a specific OP later to reduce costs.

Having said all of that, I don’t think OP_CAT is something that should be rushed through. It’s not urgent. Consensus is paramount. I just don’t share the net-negative appraisal of most hardcore Bitcoiners here.

Ademan 1y ago

Bad news about OP_VAULT https://twitter.com/reardencode/status/1756185478716657830

(I have not checked Brandon's work on this, but you can see that I had the intuition about it independently)

Ademan 1y ago

I want to remind everyone that CTV alone enables vaults https://github.com/jamesob/simple-ctv-vault

(jamesob designed OP_VAULT around the problems with these simple vaults, so that's not to say they're perfect, but I believe they are useful. In fact, I believe simple vaults gives us 90% of what we want anyway.)