Its time to talk about something controversial. CheckTemplateVerify by Jeremy Rubin...is actually pretty good. Yes, the developer has a rotten personality, but his personality will not be merged with Bitcoin is his open source code is soft forked in. I'm getting ahead of myself though, lets start with TBDXXX
What does TBDXXX actually do?
TBDxxx presents an innovative approach to achieving Chaumian e-cash-like behavior without relying on a trusted mint. The current proposal uses APO, while APO can be used to synthesize CTV, CTV is more concise, it’s a 32 byte hash vs a signature, and it’s faster due to sha2 vs ecc operations. 1
I'm bringing this up for a few reasons:
- The community has shown interest in federated e-cash mints as a way to minimize trust
a. I believe multiple e-cash mints would result in Gresham's law wherein dishonest mints print e-cash (bad money) which is treated as though it has the same value as honest mints (good money).
b. These mints being centralized entities means they serve as an easier point of attack for governments and advanced persistent threats
- People keep complaining about lightning a. Sure you can open a channel, but for someone who didn't feel the need to open a channel when fees were low, opening a channel suddenly costs $20 equivalent in sats b. You can't do cold storage with lightning, and if high fees were to become the norm, replacing the block subsidy, all cold storage users would have to pay high fees to take that little bit out of the emergency fund.
On the topic of the mempool, CTV could also help us with that
What this means practically is that by unbundling spending from redeeming we can serve a much greater number of users that if they were one aggregate product because we are taking the “expensive part” and letting it happen later than the “cheap part”. And if we do this cleverly, the “setting up the milk line” in the splitting of the spend allows all receivers to know they will get their fair share later. 2
We also know that we want to scale lightning using channel factories, however, since channel factories and TBDXXX both require either BIP 118 or BIP 119, its not really a choice between channel factories or TBDXXX, its rather a choice between BIP 118 or BIP 119
we can create a single Bitcoin tx that is n - of - n multisig which enables us to do multiparty channels with n participants in 1 transaction. So if you take n=40 we can onboard 8bn people in 1 year. If you choose n=480 we can do it in 1 month. So let's keep fingers crossed for that Bitcoin upgrade.
-Rene Pickhardt5
So how does CTV have your back with channel factories?
Now in the spirit of of not allowing for any surprises, people felt betrayed with Taproot because it allowed people to mint NFTs and outright shitcoin's using Bitcoin's blockspace. Shitcoiners have been doing this for a long time, whether it be RGB, color coins, Taro, Stamps, or Inscriptions. Yes, CTV (and APO because their use cases overlap so much) allow for the creation of new types of shitcoins and scams. The developer of CTV even goes so far as to promote them.
Jeremy Rubin is such a pain in the ass, the biggest roadblock to his own code. All I'm here to argue today, is that the massive benefits of this guy's code, outweigh the negatives (including his incredibly heavy ego as difficult as that may be to believe)
CTV was initially controversial because the developer suggested using speedy trial and pushed with his ego when the community pushed back on the idea. However, the activation method the developers desires is not a prerequisite for its implementation. We very well can soft fork CTV using an activation method that is against the developer's wishes because it is open source code after all.
I've bombarded you with enough information for now. Next time, lets do a deep dive into the technical differences between APO and CTV.
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