Re: [bitcoin-dev] An alternative: OP_CAT & OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK

[Jeremy <jlrubin@mit.edu>]

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Hi Russell,

Thanks for this detailed comparison. The COSHV BIP does include a brief
comparison to OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACKVERIFY and ANYPREVOUT, but this is more
detailed.


I think that the power from CHECKSIGFROMSTACKVERIFY is awesome. It's
clearly one of the more flexible options available and would enable a
multitude of new use cases.

When I originally presented my work on congestion control at Jan 2017
BPASE, I also discussed it as an option for covenants. Unfortunately I
think it may be on the edge of too powerful -- there are a lot of use cases
and implications from having a potentially recursive covenant. If you see
my response to Matt in the OP_COSHV BIP thread I classify it as enabling a
non-computationally enumerable set of restrictions.

I think also from a developer point of view working with OP_COSHV is much
much simpler (maybe this can be abstracted) which will lead to increased
adoption. OP_COSHV also uses less per-block bandwidth which also makes it
preferable for a measure intended to decongest blocks. Do you know the
exact byte cost for OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK? OP_COSHV scripts, with templating
changes to taproot, can be a single byte. OP_COSHV also has less potential
to have a negative interaction with future opcodes we may want like
OP_PUBKEYTWEAK. While we're getting to an exact spec for the features we
want in Bitcoin scripting, it's hard to sign on to OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK
unless there's an exact specification which makes us confident we're
hitting all the points.

If the main complaint about OP_COSHV is that it peeks at surrounding data,
it's also possible to implement it more closely to a multi-byte pushdata
opcode or do the template optimization.

Lastly, as I have previously noted, OP_LEFT is probably safer to implement
than OP_CAT and should be more efficient for OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK scripts.

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