6 upvotes, 5 direct replies (showing 5)
What do you guys think about the Bitcoin Covenants[1] presentation by Emin Gun Sirer? Here's a post about it from February[2], and I read on Twitter that it's already been implemented on the Elements Alpha sidechain. Seems to me like a very cool idea for disincentivizing theft, but I'm curious to know more about other potential ramifications.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10254&v=_Z0ID-0DOnc
2: http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/02/26/how-to-implement-secure-bitcoin-vaults/
Comment by Chris_Stewart_05 at 09/10/2016 at 20:29 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Seems like it is at odds with a fungible currency. I just listened to his presentation (not read the paper) but he made a reference to the fact that a certain set of users could (should) not accept payments from covenant contracts. IMO this invites classification of coins based on their convenance contract type, and (from what I understand) it also affects the irreversibility of payments. Again, just what I understood from his talk, post corrections if I am wrong.
Comment by RubenSomsen at 11/10/2016 at 19:44 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The covenant idea reminds me of this post[1] by /u/nullc
1: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=278122.0
Comment by G1lius at 10/10/2016 at 08:18 UTC
3 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I think there where some really good questions afterwards which pinpoint the concerns for this.
The concern of what happens when the attacker gets only the back-up key, now they can threaten to destroy your funds if you don't send it to them.
But imo more importantly: I think it burdens a lot of possible future improvements and a lot of things build on top of bitcoin, which I don't think is worth it as there's already some decent security schemes that can be done with timelocks and multisig.
Comment by chek2fire at 11/10/2016 at 12:15 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
great presentation and nice idea. Emin is a very good professor but in the other hand he has block the half bitcoin community in the social media... :P
Comment by Guy_Tell at 10/10/2016 at 13:06 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Covenants, the way it is proposed enables to give specific properties to bitcoins with unlimited depth. That's a big big change. The vault stuff sounds cool. But this proposal could also invite regulation, weaken even more Bitcoin's fungibility (when we are desperatly in the need of having a more fungible Bitcoin). And invite onchain non-financial use cases.
Overall it looks to me like their are more drawbacks than benefits, but it's certainly something worth examining and discussing. Implementing it on a sidechain is definately the way to go.