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.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bitcoindev+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/a1859d47-59f9-42ea-832a-ae03db33738en%40googlegroups.com.