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1 sat \ 11 replies \ @itsrealfake 19 Dec 2023 \ on: Opinion on Covenants? bitcoin
My concern is that if covenants are introduced powerful actors will coordinate to push coin into covenant designs which will not allow the coin to be used without meeting certain criteria (imagine on-chain morality police).
They can already do this with multisig or just custodial bitcoin. With custodial they have even more power and can rug pull and be fractional reserve, there's no reason they'd do it the 1000x more complicated way of covenants when they can do it with a custodial wallet.
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I imagine a scenario where adding covenants unlocks the ability for Uncle Gov to order Cashapp to send all withdrawals through a covenant to a user.
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that is not how it works, covenants are something you put inside of your wallet/address. unless you opt into it, they can't effect you
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What's to prevent Uncle Gov from demanding that the exchange opt into a covenant at their wallet?
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Nothing prevents Uncle Gov from demanding you use their KYC fork of bitcoin either.
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it could be seen as serving the interests of such a hypothetical uncle gov to fork:
- confuse the information space e.g. "yeah i heard bitcoin is forking a bunch, USDC is probably easier for me to use for now"
- fork fail scenario == pump & dump, worst case
what does uncle lose for attempting at a fork?
maybe i'm completely dumb... my point in the parent is that:
a) it's easier to get the exchange to engage w a forced covenant by the thumbscrews of access to banking services
b) imagine the covenant which is written in such a way that only another covenant enforced wallet can be the receiver, receive.
a boa constrictor type situation. it's not hard to imagine this idea coming out of a scenario planning exercise, so it's reasonable to ask, at least.
@delete after 2 weeks
Encumberance happens on the receiving software.
This is effectively the same attack as requiring KYC for all transactions, no covenants needed.
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deleted by author
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Why hasn't anyone added such encumbrances on Ethereum? I don't think this is actually a big threat.
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They have a Turing complete programming language, they very well could make such things on there right now. They're just too busy looking for the next way to trick users into entering a program they won't read the code for and getting rekt from.
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because ethereum is already controlled territory.
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