Blockstream and Co-inventor of Taproot says path for OP_CAT is finally clear!!! \ stacker news ~bitcoin

BREAKING: Director of Research @ Blockstream and Co-inventor of Taproot says path for OP_CAT is finally clear - ETHAN AND ARMIN FINALLY DID IT - UNBELIEVABLY SIMPLE

”You look at CAT and there’s nothing to bikeshed on - almost no technical risk - everyone likes CAT”

Watch the full clip on @BTCTKVR

Reader’s note: NOTHING in Bitcoin has ”almost no technical risk”, especially not something as powerful as covenants. But it is great to see Core devs being able to get so excited about this!

When Andrew is talking about this he must be talking about it in a rather limited ”codebase context”, not in the broader scheme of second-order knock-on effects.

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10 sats \ 2 replies \ @premitive1 7 Feb

"almost no technical risk" is a great way to get people to think this is another unknown spam vector

13 sats \ 1 reply \ @IgnaciobTato OP 7 Feb

This is the most difficult part of being a Bitcoin Dev. Security is always first and therefore its very difficult to innovate, but there were solutions out there that didn't affected the bitcoin security, like taproot.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @premitive1 7 Feb

I don't think spam affects bitcoin security. soft forks aren't just a technical question, it's also a social question.

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @gd 7 Feb

Hilarious to see how strong opinions form based on social validation.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Caleb 9 Feb

I’ve been alive long time and it only just occurred to me last week that some people actively try to figure out widely acceptable opinions and adopt them with some minor variations. I thought everyone else was making up their own minds about stuff and didn’t care about social validation.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @gd 9 Feb

If wisdom is a virtue that one should pursue, presenting group-think as wisdom can be nothing more than a virtue signal.

Virtue signals are bad because the deprive us of actual virtue

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @DiedOnTitan 7 Feb

Why not battle test the shit out of OP_CAT on testnet? Deploy AI powered fuzzers, specialists looking for holes to exploit and scenarios to test at ridiculous scale. Offer bounties. Think of gnarly evil scenarios, try to break everything, and record results.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Caleb 9 Feb

It’s a good question. IMO, Incentives aren’t there. Breaking testnet gets you 0 dollars and internet kudos. If you want lots of security, you put a big incentive out there and then wait for it to explode. Bitcoin did this perfectly by slowly ramping up value and being very conservative in development.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @pakovm 7 Feb

everyone likes CAT

Since when? If anything I've seen everyone saying that CAT is "too dangerous".

Amazing how many devs (and non devs) have been pushing back against covenants because they supposedly allow for an abstract and unlikely attack, everyone say that CAT is worse because it allows to do all the things that are supposedly dangerous to Bitcoin (can replicate basically every other behaviour from any covenant and supposedly even allow Drivechain) but suddenly "everybody likes CAT".

So what is it?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @netstatic 7 Feb

NOTHING in Bitcoin has ”almost no technical risk”, especially not something as powerful as covenants

It really doesn't though. Whether covenants is something people want feature-wise is a different story.