Re: [bitcoindev] CTV + CSFS: a letter

[fiatjaf <fiatjaf@gmail.com>]

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Good morning, I'm nobody and I certainly haven't ever contributed to 
Bitcoin Core, but I still wanted to say, just because no one mentioned 
these things, that CTV+CSFS would be great to enable the Spacechains and 
Statechains constructs.

On the spacechain front I've worked on two proof-of-concepts in the past, 
https://github.com/fiatjaf/simple-ctv-spacechain and 
https://github.com/nbd-wtf-soma and I know of at least two companies that 
showed interest in deploying decentralized spacechains, one was ZEBEDEE who 
wanted to sponsor a decentralized and open blockchain for asset transfers 
at the time I worked there, the other was Tether who was interested in an 
open blockchain dedicated to USDT. Of course these companies never made any 
real moves (besides ZEBEDEE sponsoring me for working on Soma after the 
fact) towards implementing any of these things because it was known at the 
time that the soft-forks required at the time (around 2020~2023) were all 
perceived to be "many years away".

Today I learned that Tether has deployed some kind of shit-chain called 
"usdt0" that isn't the same thing as a spacechain but has some overlap and 
likely wouldn’t exist today if a USDT spacechain had been available. There 
is also a very clear argument that if we had some kind of 
spacechain-for-assets deployed some years ago the entire utxoset-spam that 
came from the BRC-20 protocol would have not happened -- and arguably we 
could have perhaps saved at least some of the development efforts that went 
into the less bad alternative asset transfer protocols like Runes, RGB, 
Tap-ass and whatnot.

On the statechain front I have followed the development of Mercury wallet 
v1 (at some point I launched the "statecoin torch" -- to not say I didn't 
do anything) and later of the Mercury Layer 
blind-signing-server+client-side-statechain construct, and I still think it 
would have been a great protocol for transfer of Bitcoin value in many 
circumstances, but the fact that these statechains had a fixed lifespan 
given by nLockTime (a limitation required by the lack of APO or CTV+CSFS) 
certainly made it much less interesting.

I'm not claiming that if we'd had a covenant-enabling soft-fork available 
some years ago we would have spacechains thriving today and adding to the 
security budget and awareness of Bitcoin without causing any harm or using 
excessive blockspace and that blind statechains would be widely adopted for 
payments or inter-institution settlements, I am just telling some small 
anecdotes of some possibilities that we may have lost.

I'm also not saying that this soft-fork, if merged today, will cause people 
to work on these things, because probably these ships have already sailed, 
I'm merely highlighting that not doing anything has costs in lost 
opportunities and invisible risks, and that we don't know what ships 
haven't sailed yet or what we're losing today by postponing things again.

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