30s Summary

Leading Bitcoin developers claim a novel breakthrough in Bitcoin with the addition of “covenants”, a coding function that can enhance wallet and vault features without changing Bitcoin’s base code. Discussed in a research paper, “ColliderScript: Covenants in Bitcoin via 160-bit hash collisions”, the aim is to improve Bitcoin network adaptations and make transactions faster and cheaper. Yet, one developer suggests the method’s impracticality in its current condition, costing over $10 million to implement. Thus, researchers hope for more practical ways of executing covenants.

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A bunch of leading Bitcoin developers from various teams are saying they’ve made a pretty neat breakthrough on Bitcoin, the biggest and oldest blockchain around. They’ve found a way to add a type of coding, called “covenants,” which could open up some cool features for wallets and vaults and allow for more efficient layer-2 protocols.

What’s really neat is that they wouldn’t need to modify Bitcoin’s base code, which is generally a super tricky process. Usually, to make major updates, you’d need to get a consensus from the group and then launch what’s known as a “soft fork”.

They detailed all of this stuff in a research paper called, “ColliderScript: Covenants in Bitcoin via 160-bit hash collisions”.

Right now, loads of developers are flocking to Bitcoin, trying to add flexibility and additional network layers. The aim is to spur more app development on the Bitcoin network and make transactions faster and cheaper. Ideally, Bitcoin will get to where Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain, is now, but without giving up any of Bitcoin’s well-known security.

The team behind this stuff was led by Ethan Heilman, who also authored another potential technique known as OP_CAT to boost Bitcoin’s flexibility. But this OP_CAT thing would need changes to the Bitcoin software, just like a separate proposal for covenants known as OP_CTV, suggested by developer Jeremy Rubin.

Other authors of the new research paper include Victor Kobolov and Avihu Levy from the StarkWare project, and Andrew Poelstra, a veteran Bitcoin developer and head of research at Blockstream.

StarkWare posted a link to the paper and wrote that until recently, it was thought that implementing covenants on Bitcoin would require a soft fork of an additional opcode. In their paper, they showed that covenants might already be doable on Bitcoin as it is. Although their solution needs a lot of computing power, it could be optimized.

Robin Linus, another Bitcoin developer, said the research paper has a “pretty awesome idea”, but in its current form, isn’t easily practical. Linus mentioned that it would cost well over $10 million to execute such a covenant. However, he hoped that people will come up with ways to make it more feasible.