During WWII, an uncontacted island tribe learned that magical sky dragons drop food and other magical supplies. When WWII ended, the magical sky dragons stopped coming. So the "Cargo Cult" as they're called started making imitations of what they saw hoping to make whatever magical being may be happy enough to come back.

So Rubin (BIP-119 or CTV BIP author) made a deleted key "covenant"...for some reason. https://rubin.io/public/pdfs/fedcov.pdf

The problem with any design that requires deleting keys is all the trust to make it work (stop me if you've heard this one before)

Highlights from his tweet: https://x.com/jeremyrubin/status/1797339016439685440 "1. One time, a set of trustworthy devs..." "4. Bitcoin almost never has to soft fork again"

Of course! Why didn't we think of this sooner. If we just trust each other, we don't have to upgrade Bitcoin ever again....

Knowing Jeremy (in the few posts I've seen him in) this is likely his way of trolling, or it could be his way of starting a cult because he's lost his mind enough to do that.

Since we're starting cult's I decided to come up with my own janky ass design that sort of mimics CTV in many ways....such as....

I thought of a covenant like scheme that are kinda like LN commitment txs but with a twist.

It relies on the ability for child transactions to be signed before their parent transaction.

A group of users create a child tx batch (which is not broadcast to the network until later) into an n-of-n multi-sig. They create child transactions for up to the number of sats they're participating with, to go to a path outside of the multi-sig (a covenant-like transaction). This part may have a few different variations.

When all paths for all predetermined presigned transactions are signed by the other participants (except for owner of that presigned transaction who will sign later when they want to take that path) the parent tx batch transaction is signed. Now all coins are in an n-of-n multi-sig. There's no way out! You can't hope or trust the other participants in the multi-sig will let you out! Except, oh wait, we already signed a bunch of txs that do let us out (unilateral exit) before getting the uxto that came before it on-chain.

I say again, do not broadcast the signed UXTO that will send your coins to this multi-sig until you have the desired child pre-signed transactions that will let you out of it.

Now that your coins are in this multi-sig, you might notice a few things. First of all, while everyone else in the n-of-n multi-sig signed for your pre-signed tx to be spent, you did not. This is because if you did sign it before it was ready to be broadcast, any of the other signers (or just the last signer if they aren't sharing) would be able to broadcast your pre-signed tx and maybe you didn't want to even take that path! So always be the last one to sign your pre-signed tx.

Secondly, you committed to a fee rate. This will suck if you didn't have the foresight to commit to multiple fee rates any one of which would invalidate the other pre-signed txs if mined. (You might also notice that this is a LOT of rounds of signing to get everything right).

CPFP can save the day here. Just make sure the Bitcoin address you're exiting the covenant from has sats in it so you can CPFP.

Child pays for parent works by spending what would be the result of the stuck UTXO in the mempool with a higher fee. This new transaction is the child transaction and the old "stuck" transaction is its parent. (Sorry if I explained that like a loopity loop)

vTXOs don't get to work the same way they would under CTV (welcome to the pre-signed cult, there's a lot of that) First of all, its only safe to create a vTXO with another member of the n-of-n multi-sig. This is because they would have knowledge of all of the paths you could take in your offline pre-signed transactions whereas people who are not part of the cult...ahem people who are not part of the n-of-n multi-sig would not have this knowledge and would not be able to trust you.

I say again, a vTXO is not safe just because it gets spent to another member of the n-of-n multi-sig. Knowing that the vTXO can't be invalidated by another pre-signed tx is how you can gain confidence in it.

You could of course choose to trust a vTXO knowing it can be invalidated by another pre-signed tx if you're confident about paying for a higher fee rate than the other path in a CPFP bidding war.

So, what do you think of the pre-signed cult? There's no code to get it working of course so you'd have to do all of this by hand for right now, but if cult members feel motivated who knows what could get built in the future. If you think this is stupid, thank you. If you would like to say "But with CTV I could...and I can't do that with this" oh honey you can't do anything with CTV because its not activated.

As for the rest of you, welcome to the Pre-signed Cult