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James O'Beirne Publishes OP_VAULT BIP
730 sats \ 7 comments \ @fanis 13 Feb 2023 bitcoin
James O'Beirne just announced on the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list that he published a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal for OP_VAULT.
Announced something like a month or two ago, OP_VAULT would allow users to create on-chain vaults, where the user has time to react after money is spent from the vault, and repatriate the funds to a very cold storage in case the spend was illegitimate, using a pre-specified "recovery" path.
Think of it as a very specialized kind of covenant, tailor-made to fulfill only one use case: vaults.
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100 sats \ 2 replies \ @Murch 13 Feb 2023
We described the OP_VAULT proposal in Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #234, and had James O’Beirne as a guest on the Audio Recap to chat about his proposal.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @chungkingexpress 14 Feb 2023
Do you share your audio to Fountain / podcasting platforms?
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Murch 14 Feb 2023
We are working on post-processing the Twitter spaces into a podcast format, but it’s not quite there yet.
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60 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 13 Feb 2023
Great discussion of this on the latest episode of Bitcoin Review podcast.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 14 Feb 2023
Sounds cool
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @mallardshead 13 Feb 2023
Why would we need op_vault when we have miniscript? I'd argue a miniscript sovereign veto and decaying multi-sig is superior to op_vault, without the need for a fork. And then if we get a PSBTv2, I'm not sure we need vaults or covenants ever. I can't get behind this. I don't think L1 needs anything right now other than more Taproot adoption and we should turn our attention to BOLTs, not BIPs.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fanis OP 14 Feb 2023
I'd tend to agree, but OP_VAULT still has some nice features over what it's possible to do with Miniscript:
  • no need to roll the timelocks
  • spending from the main wallet can be easier, as we easily fall back to the hard-to-spend-from wallet should there be a breach
That being said, I think this theoretical limitations to sovereign veto constructs ease of use will be addressed in the future with things like HSM.
OP_VAULT definitely feels to specialized to be really worth a soft fork, at least to me. But from what I gathered listening to and reading O'Beirne, it is by design, as less contrived proposal have fail so far. Worth a shot, if only for the fruitful discussions that this proposal brings about.
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