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0 sats \ 16 replies \ @SimpleStacker 11h \ parent \ on: Why I'm Against Covenants (Jimmy Song) bitcoin
Yes, I have specific questions in regard to evidence of utility and demand, for section 1. None of the footnotes you provided gave evidence that there is a demand for the services enabled by covenants.
Footnotes 3 and 4 show evidence only of BTC market size, not evidence of demand for covenants.
Footnotes 5-11 are documents regarding what technologies covenants could enable, not evidence that those services are in demand.
I would like to have some reassurance that covenants would actually unlock more adoption and more self custody, rather than unlock more memecoinery.
Footnotes 3 and 4 show evidence only of BTC market size, not evidence of demand for covenants.
Footnote 3 shows how much BTC is locked in various kinds of bridges, which are a trusted alternative to covenants.
Footnote 4 shows how much BTC is locked in the Babylon protocol, which uses a trusted multisig in place of a covenant.
Footnotes 5-11 are documents regarding what technologies covenants could enable, not evidence that those services are in demand.
Note that this section header is titled "There is good evidence of their utility", not "there is good evidence of their demand". That said, there are plenty of examples of the developers of the technologies in question publicly "demanding" a covenant soft fork e.g. https://ctv-csfs.com/
I would like to have some reassurance that covenants would actually unlock more adoption and more self custody, rather than unlock more memecoinery.
Prior to the invention of bitcoin, it's likely >99% of the people who currently own bitcoin had no idea what the Byzantine General's Problem was or why a solution would have value to them. (And if I had to guess, they probably still don't know.) Satoshi didn't ask "is there demand for solving the Byzantine General's Problem?" and base his decision to work on bitcoin on that. Similarly covenants are a technical solution to technical problems. It takes a certain amount of insight to extrapolate from there that these solutions also have utility to end users.
In my post I explain as clear as I can the technical problems that covenants solve and how this can provide utility for end users and plausibly lead to increased bitcoin value and/or adoption. I don't know how I can make it any clearer. If you're looking for an ironclad guarantee about future bitcoin adoption, no one can give that to you, neither the covenant supporters nor the covenant opponents -- this is not something that can be known with certainty in advance.
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Yet, prior to bitcoin there were many people who extolled the virtues of hard money and expressed their beliefs in the market, so that part of the demand was known.
I wasn't asking you to make anything clearer. I think you were very clear. I am just not convinced that the utility you suggest is a more likely outcome than a bunch of L2s used for memecoins. We alerady have problems with that on Bitcoin. I am also not looking for an ironclad guarantee. You used that word, not me.
I am still just trying to formulate an opinion. This helps me see both sides.
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You said:
I would like to have some reassurance that covenants would actually unlock more adoption and more self custody, rather than unlock more memecoinery.
If the information in my post was clear, I would expect it to have at least "some reassurance" of what you're looking for. So I concluded that either I wasn't clear, or you are asking for a stronger assurance than I (or anyone else) could give.
Memecoins have existed on bitcoin since colored coins were first invented over a decade ago. Don't let their existence or possibility scare you away from supporting changes that actually improve the use of bitcoin as money.
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I'm convinced that covenants will solve some technical problems and enable more products that would be useful to people.
I'm not convinced that this is going to significantly ramp up bitcoin adoption.
I worry that it will have unintended side effects (like witness discount did in enabling inscriptions). This could indeed damage bitcoin, especially in the social layer that I mentioned in y other post.
But you are right, it's possible that no one can give me the assurances that would be pivotal to my opinion (right now).
But thank you for the discussion anyway, I think it does help me understand more the different perspectives.
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We alerady have problems with that on Bitcoin
Can you point to the problems they are already causing? Fees are at all time lows.
This is also what I don't understand in Core vs Knots. There is a lot of complaint about "spam," but when you look at the chain, there actually isn't much, else fees would be higher than ever because apparently, now we even have people actively spamming, no? So what are the problems "spam" (assuming it exists) is causing?
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UTXO set bloat is one of them. IBD on same hardware went from 3 days to 1 month for me. There is some discussion here that I was a part of: https://github.com/raspibolt/raspibolt/issues/1482#issuecomment-3263903647, to show that it's being experienced by multiple people.
One could say, get better hardware, but I thought one principle was trying to keep the cost of node running down.
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Thanks. The github discussion I linked above (copied again for convenience) shows that multiple users are experiencing this. My hypothesis was that the UTXO got too large to hold in RAM and so it is using HD, but I could easily be wrong.
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I think it's easy to forget because it's not a big problem if you're already running a node that's been up for a long time, since you only need to validate once every 10 minutes or so. I only realized it when I decided to rebuild my node from scratch.
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it is worth noting that this same "problem" would also occur if bitcoin had a large number of UTXOs for other reasons (like lots of users taking self-custody)
it's a problem that would need to be solved (and is being solved by solutions like zerosync and utreexo) regardless of the use-case that caused it.
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