4 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
Fungibility is a big concern for me, but I think there could be a place for covenants. Imagine if the Bitfinex hacker had only compromised the exchanges vault key, and the funds would not clear for 24 hours, which would give Bitfinex enough time to bust out their recovery key and undo the hack (assuming the recovery key was not also compromised).
Obviously transactions from vault addresses would need to be extremely clear that they are not confirmed until the recovery period expires. It's basically like RBF and 0-conf where wallets should alert the receiver, only in this case the vault owner defines how much time must pass before the transaction can be considered final. I'm sure there's room for abuse in such a scheme, but I think the benefits of thwarting potentially extraordinary theft are worth considering.
Comment by Chris_Stewart_05 at 09/10/2016 at 21:37 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
What would motivate me, as another user on the network to accept a payment with a covenance attached? It seems like a large hassle for me, as another us on the network to have to wait an arbitrary amount of time for ANY payment to confirm from that tx. I think the use case that Emin gave was transferring funds to yourself, which would work as you would be willing to wait for the transfer, but these type of contracts would have no place IMO to occur between two unique users on the network.
Is there really much more benefit to integrating a new OP code to the network compared to just using cold storage properly?
Comment by BitFast at 09/10/2016 at 23:06 UTC
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I'm sure covenants can be useful in a number of situation however I am also concerned about the fungibility aspect and there are plenty of things like presigned transactions, nlocktime/csv/payment channels that exchanges and other services could start to use to completely remove a large class of risk and until that happens (together with signed tickers for example) I would rather see development in other areas such as censorship resistance/privacy/fungibility.