On the experiment of the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG and marking this community process "up for grabs"

On the experiment of the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG and marking this community process "up for grabs"
2023-07-19 18:29 ` Keagan McClelland
  
From: Antoine Riard @ 2023-07-18 20:18 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

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Hi list,

Last year amid the failure of the CTV speedy trial activation and intense
conversations about a rainbow of covenant proposals, I introduced the idea
of a new community process to specify covenants [0]. This post is to resume
the experiment so far and officially mark the process maintenance as "up
for grabs", as I won't actively pursue it further (after wavering on such a
decision a bit during May / June).

Few of the goals announced at that time were to build a consistent
framework to evaluate covenant proposals, see the common grounds between
proposals if they could be composed or combined by their authors, open the
consensus  changes development process beyond the historical boundaries of
Bitcoin Core and maintain high-quality technical archive as a consensus
discussions have spawned half a decade from intellectual conception to
activation in average (at least for segwit, schnorr, taproot).

Such effort was a speak-by-the-act answer to the issues in
consensus development changes pointed out by Jeremy Rubin in April of last
year [1]: namely the lack of a "codified checklist" for consensus changes,
that "consensus is memoryless" and "bitcoin core is not bitcoin"
(independently of the technical concerns as I have as limited or
non-adequate primitive for vaults / payment pools I expressed during the
same time). Other complementary initiatives have been undertaken during the
same period, AJ with the bitcoin-inquisition fork where the community of
developers and contracting primitives of researchers on a consensus-enabled
fork of core [2]. And Dave Harding with the careful archiving of all
covenant proposals under the Optech umbrella [3].

About the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG, a Github repository was
started and maintained to archive and document all the primitives (apo,
tluv, ctv, the taproot annex, sighash_group, CSFS, cat, txhash, evict,
check_output_covenant_verify, inherited ids, anyamount, singletons,
op_vault) and the corresponding protocols (payment pools, vaults,
drivechains, trust-minimized mining pools payouts). We had a total of 6
monthly meetings on the Libera chat #bitcoin-contracting-primitives-wg for
a number of more than 20 individual attendees representing most of the
parts of the community. I think (missing march logs). Numerous in-depth
discussions did happen on the repository and on the channel on things like
"merkelized all the things" or "payment pools for miners payoffs".

As I've been busy on the Lightning-side and other Bitcoin projects, I've
not run an online meeting since the month of April, while still having a
bunch of fruitful technical discussions with folks involved in the effort
at conferences and elsewhere. I launched the effort as an experiment with
the soft commitment to dedicate 20% of my time on it, after few successful
sessions I think such a process has an interest of its own, however it
comes with direct competition of my time to work on Lightning robustness.
Getting my hands dirty on low-level LDK development recently made me
realize we still have years of titan work to get a secure and reliable
Lightning Network.

As such, between extended covenant capabilities for advanced contracts
coming as a reality for Bitcoin _or_ LN working smoothly at scale with
50-100M UTXO-sharing users on it during the next 5-7 years cycle, I think
the latter goal is more critical for Bitcoin existential survival, and
where on a personal title I'll allocate the best of my time and energy (and
somehow it match the "slow" technical activity on bitcoin-inquisition
mostly done by Lightning hands).

This is my personal conclusion only on the state of Bitcoin technological
momentum, and this is quite tainted by my deep background in Lightning
development. If you've been working on covenant changes proposals, please
don't take it as a discouragement, I think Taproot (privacy-preserving
script policies behind the taproot tree branches) and Schnorr (for native
multi-sig) soft forks have shown how it can improve the building of
self-custody solutions by one or two order of magnitude, and small
incremental changes might be good enough to have a lower technical
consensus bar.

On my side, I'll pursue pure R&D works on CoinPool, notably coming with
better solutions with the interactivity issue and mass-compression of
withdrawal and design exotic advanced Bitcoin contracts based on the
taproot annex, though more in a "l'art pour l'art" approach for the time
being [4]. Additionally, I might start to submit an in-depth security
review of consensus changes under pseudonyms, it has already been done in
the past and somehow it's good practice in terms of "message neutrality"
[5]. If folks wanna experiment in terms of payment pools deployment, Greg
Maxwell's old joinpool can be used today (and somehow it's worthy of its
own as a net advance for coinjoins).

I'll honestly acknowledge towards the community, I might have overpromised
with the kickstart of this new process aiming to move the frontlines in
matters of Bitcoin consensus changes development process. On the other
hand, I think enough sessions of the working group have been runned and
enough marks of technical interests have been collected to demonstrate the
minimal value of such a process, so I would estimate my open-source balance
sheet towards the community to be in good standing ? (open-minded question).

I don't think Bitcoin fundamentally lacks compelling technical proposals to
advance the capabilities of Bitcoin Script today, nor the crowd of seasoned
and smart protocol developers to evaluate mature proposals end-to-end and
on multiple dimensions with a spirit of independence. Rather, I believe
what Bitcoin is lacking is a small crowd of technical historians and
archivist doing the work of assessing, collecting and preserving consensus
changes proposals and QA devs to ensure any consensus change proposals has
world-class battle-ground testing before to be considered for deployment,
ideally with the best standards of Bitcoin decentralization and FOSS
neutrality [6].

If you would like to pursue the maintenance and nurturing of the Bitcoin
Contracting Primitives WG (or the bitcoin-inquisition fork or collaborate
with Optech to organize industry-wise workshop on covenants at the image of
what has been done in 2019 for Taproot), that you're willing to show
proof-of-work and you estimate that operational ground, legal information
or financial resources will anchor your individual work on the long-term,
don't hesitate to reach out, I'll see what I can do with a disinterested
mind [7].

With humility,
Antoine

[0]
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-July/020763.html
[1]
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020233.html
[2]
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-September/020921.html
[3] https://github.com/bitcoinops/bitcoinops.github.io/pull/806
[4] Version 0.2 of the CoinPool whitepaper addressing most of the remaining
"Big Problems" is still pending on my visit to co-author Gleb Naumenko in
Ukraine, which has been postponed few times in light of the conflict
operational evolutions.
[5] See
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2020-February/017614.html.
For the philosophical reasons of doing so, I invite you to read Foucault's
famous essay "Le philosophe masque".
[6] Somehow I come to share Jeremy's thesis's "Product management is not
"my Job" it's yours" in matters of consensus changes. I believe we might be
past the technical complexity threshold where even simple consensus changes
can be conducted from A to Z as a one man job or even by a group of 2/3
elite devs.
[7] I've been reached out multiple times and consistently by R&D
non-profits, plebs whales and VC firms who were interested to commit
resources to advance softforks and covenants in the Bitcoin space, no doubt
when you're reliable and with a track record, folks are ready to offer you
opportunities to work full-time on consensus changes.

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 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2023-07-18 20:18 [bitcoin-dev] On the experiment of the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG and marking this community process "up for grabs" Antoine Riard

  2023-07-19 20:45   ` Greg Sanders
  2023-07-20  5:33   ` Antoine Riard
  
From: Keagan McClelland @ 2023-07-19 18:29 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Antoine Riard, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

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Hi Antoine,

Thank you for the effort you've put towards this. I generally agree that a
smooth functioning Lightning Network is of greater importance than advanced
contracting capabilities. However, as I dive deeper into some of the more
ambitious goals for LN development I am learning that a great deal of
complexity of some current lightning (LN) proposals can be handily
discharged with CTV. While I am not intimately familiar with all of the
other covenant schemes to the same level of technical proficiency, I have a
suspicion that a number of them, if not all of them, are capable of
discharging the same flavor and amount of complexity as well. Others should
chime in if they can confirm this claim.

I have been publicly on the record as supporting the addition of some
covenant scheme into Bitcoin for some time and have long held on
theoretical grounds that the addition of such a mechanism is both necessary
and inevitable if Bitcoin is to survive in the long term. However, as I've
started to work more directly with the Lightning protocol, these
theoretical and purely logical arguments became far more concrete and
immediately beneficial.

I say this primarily to challenge the idea that covenants are a distraction
from lightning development. It may very well be that your areas of focus on
LN preclude you from splitting your attention and none of this email should
be interpreted as a criticism of you applying your efforts in the highest
leverage manner you can manage. That said, I don't want observers of this
thread to walk away with the impression that they are two independent
efforts as covenants can significantly contribute to LN's maturity. When
and how should they be prioritized? Unfortunately I don't feel able to
comment on that at this time. All I know is that Lightning would almost
certainly benefit substantially from having a covenant primitive.

Cheers,
Keags

On Tue, Jul 18, 2023 at 3:40 PM Antoine Riard via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> Hi list,
>
> Last year amid the failure of the CTV speedy trial activation and intense
> conversations about a rainbow of covenant proposals, I introduced the idea
> of a new community process to specify covenants [0]. This post is to resume
> the experiment so far and officially mark the process maintenance as "up
> for grabs", as I won't actively pursue it further (after wavering on such a
> decision a bit during May / June).
>
> Few of the goals announced at that time were to build a consistent
> framework to evaluate covenant proposals, see the common grounds between
> proposals if they could be composed or combined by their authors, open the
> consensus  changes development process beyond the historical boundaries of
> Bitcoin Core and maintain high-quality technical archive as a consensus
> discussions have spawned half a decade from intellectual conception to
> activation in average (at least for segwit, schnorr, taproot).
>
> Such effort was a speak-by-the-act answer to the issues in
> consensus development changes pointed out by Jeremy Rubin in April of last
> year [1]: namely the lack of a "codified checklist" for consensus changes,
> that "consensus is memoryless" and "bitcoin core is not bitcoin"
> (independently of the technical concerns as I have as limited or
> non-adequate primitive for vaults / payment pools I expressed during the
> same time). Other complementary initiatives have been undertaken during the
> same period, AJ with the bitcoin-inquisition fork where the community of
> developers and contracting primitives of researchers on a consensus-enabled
> fork of core [2]. And Dave Harding with the careful archiving of all
> covenant proposals under the Optech umbrella [3].
>
> About the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG, a Github repository was
> started and maintained to archive and document all the primitives (apo,
> tluv, ctv, the taproot annex, sighash_group, CSFS, cat, txhash, evict,
> check_output_covenant_verify, inherited ids, anyamount, singletons,
> op_vault) and the corresponding protocols (payment pools, vaults,
> drivechains, trust-minimized mining pools payouts). We had a total of 6
> monthly meetings on the Libera chat #bitcoin-contracting-primitives-wg for
> a number of more than 20 individual attendees representing most of the
> parts of the community. I think (missing march logs). Numerous in-depth
> discussions did happen on the repository and on the channel on things like
> "merkelized all the things" or "payment pools for miners payoffs".
>
> As I've been busy on the Lightning-side and other Bitcoin projects, I've
> not run an online meeting since the month of April, while still having a
> bunch of fruitful technical discussions with folks involved in the effort
> at conferences and elsewhere. I launched the effort as an experiment with
> the soft commitment to dedicate 20% of my time on it, after few successful
> sessions I think such a process has an interest of its own, however it
> comes with direct competition of my time to work on Lightning robustness.
> Getting my hands dirty on low-level LDK development recently made me
> realize we still have years of titan work to get a secure and reliable
> Lightning Network.
>
> As such, between extended covenant capabilities for advanced contracts
> coming as a reality for Bitcoin _or_ LN working smoothly at scale with
> 50-100M UTXO-sharing users on it during the next 5-7 years cycle, I think
> the latter goal is more critical for Bitcoin existential survival, and
> where on a personal title I'll allocate the best of my time and energy (and
> somehow it match the "slow" technical activity on bitcoin-inquisition
> mostly done by Lightning hands).
>
> This is my personal conclusion only on the state of Bitcoin technological
> momentum, and this is quite tainted by my deep background in Lightning
> development. If you've been working on covenant changes proposals, please
> don't take it as a discouragement, I think Taproot (privacy-preserving
> script policies behind the taproot tree branches) and Schnorr (for native
> multi-sig) soft forks have shown how it can improve the building of
> self-custody solutions by one or two order of magnitude, and small
> incremental changes might be good enough to have a lower technical
> consensus bar.
>
> On my side, I'll pursue pure R&D works on CoinPool, notably coming with
> better solutions with the interactivity issue and mass-compression of
> withdrawal and design exotic advanced Bitcoin contracts based on the
> taproot annex, though more in a "l'art pour l'art" approach for the time
> being [4]. Additionally, I might start to submit an in-depth security
> review of consensus changes under pseudonyms, it has already been done in
> the past and somehow it's good practice in terms of "message neutrality"
> [5]. If folks wanna experiment in terms of payment pools deployment, Greg
> Maxwell's old joinpool can be used today (and somehow it's worthy of its
> own as a net advance for coinjoins).
>
> I'll honestly acknowledge towards the community, I might have overpromised
> with the kickstart of this new process aiming to move the frontlines in
> matters of Bitcoin consensus changes development process. On the other
> hand, I think enough sessions of the working group have been runned and
> enough marks of technical interests have been collected to demonstrate the
> minimal value of such a process, so I would estimate my open-source balance
> sheet towards the community to be in good standing ? (open-minded question).
>
> I don't think Bitcoin fundamentally lacks compelling technical proposals
> to advance the capabilities of Bitcoin Script today, nor the crowd of
> seasoned and smart protocol developers to evaluate mature proposals
> end-to-end and on multiple dimensions with a spirit of independence.
> Rather, I believe what Bitcoin is lacking is a small crowd of technical
> historians and archivist doing the work of assessing, collecting and
> preserving consensus changes proposals and QA devs to ensure any consensus
> change proposals has world-class battle-ground testing before to be
> considered for deployment, ideally with the best standards of Bitcoin
> decentralization and FOSS neutrality [6].
>
> If you would like to pursue the maintenance and nurturing of the Bitcoin
> Contracting Primitives WG (or the bitcoin-inquisition fork or collaborate
> with Optech to organize industry-wise workshop on covenants at the image of
> what has been done in 2019 for Taproot), that you're willing to show
> proof-of-work and you estimate that operational ground, legal information
> or financial resources will anchor your individual work on the long-term,
> don't hesitate to reach out, I'll see what I can do with a disinterested
> mind [7].
>
> With humility,
> Antoine
>
> [0]
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-July/020763.html
> [1]
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020233.html
> [2]
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-September/020921.html
> [3] https://github.com/bitcoinops/bitcoinops.github.io/pull/806
> [4] Version 0.2 of the CoinPool whitepaper addressing most of the
> remaining "Big Problems" is still pending on my visit to co-author Gleb
> Naumenko in Ukraine, which has been postponed few times in light of the
> conflict operational evolutions.
> [5] See
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2020-February/017614.html.
> For the philosophical reasons of doing so, I invite you to read Foucault's
> famous essay "Le philosophe masque".
> [6] Somehow I come to share Jeremy's thesis's "Product management is not
> "my Job" it's yours" in matters of consensus changes. I believe we might be
> past the technical complexity threshold where even simple consensus changes
> can be conducted from A to Z as a one man job or even by a group of 2/3
> elite devs.
> [7] I've been reached out multiple times and consistently by R&D
> non-profits, plebs whales and VC firms who were interested to commit
> resources to advance softforks and covenants in the Bitcoin space, no doubt
> when you're reliable and with a track record, folks are ready to offer you
> opportunities to work full-time on consensus changes.
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>

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 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2023-07-19 18:29 ` Keagan McClelland

  2023-07-20  5:46     ` Antoine Riard
  2023-07-20  5:33   ` Antoine Riard
  
From: Greg Sanders @ 2023-07-19 20:45 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Keagan McClelland, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

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Hello Keagen,

Most of the complexity of LN cannot be resolved with covenants. Of the
things that can be simplified in my experience, you're going to need more
than CTV to get significant gains. And in the end, channels can only get so
simple since we have many other BOLTs to deal with. And even then, you're
going to have to convince LN spec writers to include such changes, whatever
they are, then get deployment.

Step 1 is finding a primitive that seems interesting. It's important to
moderate enthusiasm for any primitive with reality, and probably by being
concrete by writing specs that use a primitive, and code it up to discover
what we're overlooking. We're always overlooking something! In my humble
opinion these are step 2 and 3 of gathering mind-share.

As a more productive tact, if we're thinking beyond 2/small party channels,
probably better to snap your fingers, pretend we have Simplicity, see what
we can build, and work backwards from there to see if we can accomplish
this within the confines of bitcoin script?

Cheers,
Greg

On Wed, Jul 19, 2023 at 3:59 PM Keagan McClelland via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> Hi Antoine,
>
> Thank you for the effort you've put towards this. I generally agree that a
> smooth functioning Lightning Network is of greater importance than advanced
> contracting capabilities. However, as I dive deeper into some of the more
> ambitious goals for LN development I am learning that a great deal of
> complexity of some current lightning (LN) proposals can be handily
> discharged with CTV. While I am not intimately familiar with all of the
> other covenant schemes to the same level of technical proficiency, I have a
> suspicion that a number of them, if not all of them, are capable of
> discharging the same flavor and amount of complexity as well. Others should
> chime in if they can confirm this claim.
>
> I have been publicly on the record as supporting the addition of some
> covenant scheme into Bitcoin for some time and have long held on
> theoretical grounds that the addition of such a mechanism is both necessary
> and inevitable if Bitcoin is to survive in the long term. However, as I've
> started to work more directly with the Lightning protocol, these
> theoretical and purely logical arguments became far more concrete and
> immediately beneficial.
>
> I say this primarily to challenge the idea that covenants are a
> distraction from lightning development. It may very well be that your areas
> of focus on LN preclude you from splitting your attention and none of this
> email should be interpreted as a criticism of you applying your efforts in
> the highest leverage manner you can manage. That said, I don't want
> observers of this thread to walk away with the impression that they are two
> independent efforts as covenants can significantly contribute to LN's
> maturity. When and how should they be prioritized? Unfortunately I don't
> feel able to comment on that at this time. All I know is that Lightning
> would almost certainly benefit substantially from having a covenant
> primitive.
>
> Cheers,
> Keags
>
> On Tue, Jul 18, 2023 at 3:40 PM Antoine Riard via bitcoin-dev <
> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi list,
>>
>> Last year amid the failure of the CTV speedy trial activation and intense
>> conversations about a rainbow of covenant proposals, I introduced the idea
>> of a new community process to specify covenants [0]. This post is to resume
>> the experiment so far and officially mark the process maintenance as "up
>> for grabs", as I won't actively pursue it further (after wavering on such a
>> decision a bit during May / June).
>>
>> Few of the goals announced at that time were to build a consistent
>> framework to evaluate covenant proposals, see the common grounds between
>> proposals if they could be composed or combined by their authors, open the
>> consensus  changes development process beyond the historical boundaries of
>> Bitcoin Core and maintain high-quality technical archive as a consensus
>> discussions have spawned half a decade from intellectual conception to
>> activation in average (at least for segwit, schnorr, taproot).
>>
>> Such effort was a speak-by-the-act answer to the issues in
>> consensus development changes pointed out by Jeremy Rubin in April of last
>> year [1]: namely the lack of a "codified checklist" for consensus changes,
>> that "consensus is memoryless" and "bitcoin core is not bitcoin"
>> (independently of the technical concerns as I have as limited or
>> non-adequate primitive for vaults / payment pools I expressed during the
>> same time). Other complementary initiatives have been undertaken during the
>> same period, AJ with the bitcoin-inquisition fork where the community of
>> developers and contracting primitives of researchers on a consensus-enabled
>> fork of core [2]. And Dave Harding with the careful archiving of all
>> covenant proposals under the Optech umbrella [3].
>>
>> About the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG, a Github repository was
>> started and maintained to archive and document all the primitives (apo,
>> tluv, ctv, the taproot annex, sighash_group, CSFS, cat, txhash, evict,
>> check_output_covenant_verify, inherited ids, anyamount, singletons,
>> op_vault) and the corresponding protocols (payment pools, vaults,
>> drivechains, trust-minimized mining pools payouts). We had a total of 6
>> monthly meetings on the Libera chat #bitcoin-contracting-primitives-wg for
>> a number of more than 20 individual attendees representing most of the
>> parts of the community. I think (missing march logs). Numerous in-depth
>> discussions did happen on the repository and on the channel on things like
>> "merkelized all the things" or "payment pools for miners payoffs".
>>
>> As I've been busy on the Lightning-side and other Bitcoin projects, I've
>> not run an online meeting since the month of April, while still having a
>> bunch of fruitful technical discussions with folks involved in the effort
>> at conferences and elsewhere. I launched the effort as an experiment with
>> the soft commitment to dedicate 20% of my time on it, after few successful
>> sessions I think such a process has an interest of its own, however it
>> comes with direct competition of my time to work on Lightning robustness.
>> Getting my hands dirty on low-level LDK development recently made me
>> realize we still have years of titan work to get a secure and reliable
>> Lightning Network.
>>
>> As such, between extended covenant capabilities for advanced contracts
>> coming as a reality for Bitcoin _or_ LN working smoothly at scale with
>> 50-100M UTXO-sharing users on it during the next 5-7 years cycle, I think
>> the latter goal is more critical for Bitcoin existential survival, and
>> where on a personal title I'll allocate the best of my time and energy (and
>> somehow it match the "slow" technical activity on bitcoin-inquisition
>> mostly done by Lightning hands).
>>
>> This is my personal conclusion only on the state of Bitcoin technological
>> momentum, and this is quite tainted by my deep background in Lightning
>> development. If you've been working on covenant changes proposals, please
>> don't take it as a discouragement, I think Taproot (privacy-preserving
>> script policies behind the taproot tree branches) and Schnorr (for native
>> multi-sig) soft forks have shown how it can improve the building of
>> self-custody solutions by one or two order of magnitude, and small
>> incremental changes might be good enough to have a lower technical
>> consensus bar.
>>
>> On my side, I'll pursue pure R&D works on CoinPool, notably coming with
>> better solutions with the interactivity issue and mass-compression of
>> withdrawal and design exotic advanced Bitcoin contracts based on the
>> taproot annex, though more in a "l'art pour l'art" approach for the time
>> being [4]. Additionally, I might start to submit an in-depth security
>> review of consensus changes under pseudonyms, it has already been done in
>> the past and somehow it's good practice in terms of "message neutrality"
>> [5]. If folks wanna experiment in terms of payment pools deployment, Greg
>> Maxwell's old joinpool can be used today (and somehow it's worthy of its
>> own as a net advance for coinjoins).
>>
>> I'll honestly acknowledge towards the community, I might have
>> overpromised with the kickstart of this new process aiming to move the
>> frontlines in matters of Bitcoin consensus changes development process. On
>> the other hand, I think enough sessions of the working group have been
>> runned and enough marks of technical interests have been collected to
>> demonstrate the minimal value of such a process, so I would estimate my
>> open-source balance sheet towards the community to be in good standing ?
>> (open-minded question).
>>
>> I don't think Bitcoin fundamentally lacks compelling technical proposals
>> to advance the capabilities of Bitcoin Script today, nor the crowd of
>> seasoned and smart protocol developers to evaluate mature proposals
>> end-to-end and on multiple dimensions with a spirit of independence.
>> Rather, I believe what Bitcoin is lacking is a small crowd of technical
>> historians and archivist doing the work of assessing, collecting and
>> preserving consensus changes proposals and QA devs to ensure any consensus
>> change proposals has world-class battle-ground testing before to be
>> considered for deployment, ideally with the best standards of Bitcoin
>> decentralization and FOSS neutrality [6].
>>
>> If you would like to pursue the maintenance and nurturing of the Bitcoin
>> Contracting Primitives WG (or the bitcoin-inquisition fork or collaborate
>> with Optech to organize industry-wise workshop on covenants at the image of
>> what has been done in 2019 for Taproot), that you're willing to show
>> proof-of-work and you estimate that operational ground, legal information
>> or financial resources will anchor your individual work on the long-term,
>> don't hesitate to reach out, I'll see what I can do with a disinterested
>> mind [7].
>>
>> With humility,
>> Antoine
>>
>> [0]
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-July/020763.html
>> [1]
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020233.html
>> [2]
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-September/020921.html
>> [3] https://github.com/bitcoinops/bitcoinops.github.io/pull/806
>> [4] Version 0.2 of the CoinPool whitepaper addressing most of the
>> remaining "Big Problems" is still pending on my visit to co-author Gleb
>> Naumenko in Ukraine, which has been postponed few times in light of the
>> conflict operational evolutions.
>> [5] See
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2020-February/017614.html.
>> For the philosophical reasons of doing so, I invite you to read Foucault's
>> famous essay "Le philosophe masque".
>> [6] Somehow I come to share Jeremy's thesis's "Product management is not
>> "my Job" it's yours" in matters of consensus changes. I believe we might be
>> past the technical complexity threshold where even simple consensus changes
>> can be conducted from A to Z as a one man job or even by a group of 2/3
>> elite devs.
>> [7] I've been reached out multiple times and consistently by R&D
>> non-profits, plebs whales and VC firms who were interested to commit
>> resources to advance softforks and covenants in the Bitcoin space, no doubt
>> when you're reliable and with a track record, folks are ready to offer you
>> opportunities to work full-time on consensus changes.
>> _______________________________________________
>> bitcoin-dev mailing list
>> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>>
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>

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 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2023-07-19 18:29 ` Keagan McClelland
  2023-07-19 20:45   ` Greg Sanders

  
From: Antoine Riard @ 2023-07-20  5:33 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Keagan McClelland;  Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

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Hi Keagan,

On the claim that advanced contracting capabilities can improve the
Lightning Network, yes this is a claim I can back and why with Gleb we
published ideas about payment pools back in 2020, pointing out clearly the
limitations of 2-party payment channels in terms of privacy and scalability
dimensions [0]. There are few discussions on the same thread on trade-off
of hashchain covenants like CTV in terms of off-chain constructions, where
they can be evaluated on a bunch of dimensions like key management, fee
cost, liquidity counterparty interactivity and security risks among others.

I don't know if Bitcoin _needs_ covenant schemes to survive on the long
term though yes I'll join the appreciation than few covenants (notable ones
improving payment pools or channel factories and self-custody solutions)
are increasing the odds of success of Bitcoin survival on dimensions like
onboarding / transactional scaling and "non-first-party to self-sovereign
custody" shapes of solutions. On a theoretical proof that covenants are
formally needed, well one would have to reduce Bitcoin (and probably
Lightning and the mining ecosystem) to a workable game-theory, and define
this game to rely on practice assumptions to bound the dynamics of the
"real-world" context [1].

On the latest claim that Lightning of today *might* benefit from a covenant
primitive, it's hard to evaluate as the foundations of channel operations
are quite under intense re-works from taproot, schnorr and package relay
(affecting all the dimensions). Yet one might notice that "high-level"
Lightning is more isolated than those ongoing changes, and where covenant
primitives might be useful. I think there is a widely-known issue among the
DLC development community on the limitations of signatures compared to
CTV-like "hash-chain" in matters of financial engineering expressivity over
a wide outcome space [2], [3], [4]. We experimented in the past DLC
integration in LDK, though never so far to evaluate the practical
performance bounds of curve points addition on what what you can express as
advanced contracts (the original coinpool post points to the factorial
complexity bound for withdrawal of unknown order and therefore covenant
capabilities improves the issue, though here it's an issue of _any_ state
being dependent on an unknown combination of oracle-sourced events).

Best,
Antoine

[0]
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2020-June/017964.html
[1] E.g the delicate difference between the "theory" and "practice" from
the viewpoint of physics, I would send back to Einstein's general theory
where few (anecdotic?) experiments have cast doubts on its validity, e.g
Miller's experiment in the 20s, and the echoes it had in scientific
epistemology during the XXth.
[2]
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-January/019808.html
[3] https://mailmanlists.org/pipermail/dlc-dev/2021-November/000091.html
[4]
https://github.com/bitcoinops/bitcoinops.github.io/pull/806#issuecomment-1232073574

Le mer. 19 juil. 2023 à 19:29, Keagan McClelland <
keagan.mcclelland@gmail•com> a écrit :

> Hi Antoine,
>
> Thank you for the effort you've put towards this. I generally agree that a
> smooth functioning Lightning Network is of greater importance than advanced
> contracting capabilities. However, as I dive deeper into some of the more
> ambitious goals for LN development I am learning that a great deal of
> complexity of some current lightning (LN) proposals can be handily
> discharged with CTV. While I am not intimately familiar with all of the
> other covenant schemes to the same level of technical proficiency, I have a
> suspicion that a number of them, if not all of them, are capable of
> discharging the same flavor and amount of complexity as well. Others should
> chime in if they can confirm this claim.
>
> I have been publicly on the record as supporting the addition of some
> covenant scheme into Bitcoin for some time and have long held on
> theoretical grounds that the addition of such a mechanism is both necessary
> and inevitable if Bitcoin is to survive in the long term. However, as I've
> started to work more directly with the Lightning protocol, these
> theoretical and purely logical arguments became far more concrete and
> immediately beneficial.
>
> I say this primarily to challenge the idea that covenants are a
> distraction from lightning development. It may very well be that your areas
> of focus on LN preclude you from splitting your attention and none of this
> email should be interpreted as a criticism of you applying your efforts in
> the highest leverage manner you can manage. That said, I don't want
> observers of this thread to walk away with the impression that they are two
> independent efforts as covenants can significantly contribute to LN's
> maturity. When and how should they be prioritized? Unfortunately I don't
> feel able to comment on that at this time. All I know is that Lightning
> would almost certainly benefit substantially from having a covenant
> primitive.
>
> Cheers,
> Keags
>
> On Tue, Jul 18, 2023 at 3:40 PM Antoine Riard via bitcoin-dev <
> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi list,
>>
>> Last year amid the failure of the CTV speedy trial activation and intense
>> conversations about a rainbow of covenant proposals, I introduced the idea
>> of a new community process to specify covenants [0]. This post is to resume
>> the experiment so far and officially mark the process maintenance as "up
>> for grabs", as I won't actively pursue it further (after wavering on such a
>> decision a bit during May / June).
>>
>> Few of the goals announced at that time were to build a consistent
>> framework to evaluate covenant proposals, see the common grounds between
>> proposals if they could be composed or combined by their authors, open the
>> consensus  changes development process beyond the historical boundaries of
>> Bitcoin Core and maintain high-quality technical archive as a consensus
>> discussions have spawned half a decade from intellectual conception to
>> activation in average (at least for segwit, schnorr, taproot).
>>
>> Such effort was a speak-by-the-act answer to the issues in
>> consensus development changes pointed out by Jeremy Rubin in April of last
>> year [1]: namely the lack of a "codified checklist" for consensus changes,
>> that "consensus is memoryless" and "bitcoin core is not bitcoin"
>> (independently of the technical concerns as I have as limited or
>> non-adequate primitive for vaults / payment pools I expressed during the
>> same time). Other complementary initiatives have been undertaken during the
>> same period, AJ with the bitcoin-inquisition fork where the community of
>> developers and contracting primitives of researchers on a consensus-enabled
>> fork of core [2]. And Dave Harding with the careful archiving of all
>> covenant proposals under the Optech umbrella [3].
>>
>> About the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG, a Github repository was
>> started and maintained to archive and document all the primitives (apo,
>> tluv, ctv, the taproot annex, sighash_group, CSFS, cat, txhash, evict,
>> check_output_covenant_verify, inherited ids, anyamount, singletons,
>> op_vault) and the corresponding protocols (payment pools, vaults,
>> drivechains, trust-minimized mining pools payouts). We had a total of 6
>> monthly meetings on the Libera chat #bitcoin-contracting-primitives-wg for
>> a number of more than 20 individual attendees representing most of the
>> parts of the community. I think (missing march logs). Numerous in-depth
>> discussions did happen on the repository and on the channel on things like
>> "merkelized all the things" or "payment pools for miners payoffs".
>>
>> As I've been busy on the Lightning-side and other Bitcoin projects, I've
>> not run an online meeting since the month of April, while still having a
>> bunch of fruitful technical discussions with folks involved in the effort
>> at conferences and elsewhere. I launched the effort as an experiment with
>> the soft commitment to dedicate 20% of my time on it, after few successful
>> sessions I think such a process has an interest of its own, however it
>> comes with direct competition of my time to work on Lightning robustness.
>> Getting my hands dirty on low-level LDK development recently made me
>> realize we still have years of titan work to get a secure and reliable
>> Lightning Network.
>>
>> As such, between extended covenant capabilities for advanced contracts
>> coming as a reality for Bitcoin _or_ LN working smoothly at scale with
>> 50-100M UTXO-sharing users on it during the next 5-7 years cycle, I think
>> the latter goal is more critical for Bitcoin existential survival, and
>> where on a personal title I'll allocate the best of my time and energy (and
>> somehow it match the "slow" technical activity on bitcoin-inquisition
>> mostly done by Lightning hands).
>>
>> This is my personal conclusion only on the state of Bitcoin technological
>> momentum, and this is quite tainted by my deep background in Lightning
>> development. If you've been working on covenant changes proposals, please
>> don't take it as a discouragement, I think Taproot (privacy-preserving
>> script policies behind the taproot tree branches) and Schnorr (for native
>> multi-sig) soft forks have shown how it can improve the building of
>> self-custody solutions by one or two order of magnitude, and small
>> incremental changes might be good enough to have a lower technical
>> consensus bar.
>>
>> On my side, I'll pursue pure R&D works on CoinPool, notably coming with
>> better solutions with the interactivity issue and mass-compression of
>> withdrawal and design exotic advanced Bitcoin contracts based on the
>> taproot annex, though more in a "l'art pour l'art" approach for the time
>> being [4]. Additionally, I might start to submit an in-depth security
>> review of consensus changes under pseudonyms, it has already been done in
>> the past and somehow it's good practice in terms of "message neutrality"
>> [5]. If folks wanna experiment in terms of payment pools deployment, Greg
>> Maxwell's old joinpool can be used today (and somehow it's worthy of its
>> own as a net advance for coinjoins).
>>
>> I'll honestly acknowledge towards the community, I might have
>> overpromised with the kickstart of this new process aiming to move the
>> frontlines in matters of Bitcoin consensus changes development process. On
>> the other hand, I think enough sessions of the working group have been
>> runned and enough marks of technical interests have been collected to
>> demonstrate the minimal value of such a process, so I would estimate my
>> open-source balance sheet towards the community to be in good standing ?
>> (open-minded question).
>>
>> I don't think Bitcoin fundamentally lacks compelling technical proposals
>> to advance the capabilities of Bitcoin Script today, nor the crowd of
>> seasoned and smart protocol developers to evaluate mature proposals
>> end-to-end and on multiple dimensions with a spirit of independence.
>> Rather, I believe what Bitcoin is lacking is a small crowd of technical
>> historians and archivist doing the work of assessing, collecting and
>> preserving consensus changes proposals and QA devs to ensure any consensus
>> change proposals has world-class battle-ground testing before to be
>> considered for deployment, ideally with the best standards of Bitcoin
>> decentralization and FOSS neutrality [6].
>>
>> If you would like to pursue the maintenance and nurturing of the Bitcoin
>> Contracting Primitives WG (or the bitcoin-inquisition fork or collaborate
>> with Optech to organize industry-wise workshop on covenants at the image of
>> what has been done in 2019 for Taproot), that you're willing to show
>> proof-of-work and you estimate that operational ground, legal information
>> or financial resources will anchor your individual work on the long-term,
>> don't hesitate to reach out, I'll see what I can do with a disinterested
>> mind [7].
>>
>> With humility,
>> Antoine
>>
>> [0]
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-July/020763.html
>> [1]
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020233.html
>> [2]
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-September/020921.html
>> [3] https://github.com/bitcoinops/bitcoinops.github.io/pull/806
>> [4] Version 0.2 of the CoinPool whitepaper addressing most of the
>> remaining "Big Problems" is still pending on my visit to co-author Gleb
>> Naumenko in Ukraine, which has been postponed few times in light of the
>> conflict operational evolutions.
>> [5] See
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2020-February/017614.html.
>> For the philosophical reasons of doing so, I invite you to read Foucault's
>> famous essay "Le philosophe masque".
>> [6] Somehow I come to share Jeremy's thesis's "Product management is not
>> "my Job" it's yours" in matters of consensus changes. I believe we might be
>> past the technical complexity threshold where even simple consensus changes
>> can be conducted from A to Z as a one man job or even by a group of 2/3
>> elite devs.
>> [7] I've been reached out multiple times and consistently by R&D
>> non-profits, plebs whales and VC firms who were interested to commit
>> resources to advance softforks and covenants in the Bitcoin space, no doubt
>> when you're reliable and with a track record, folks are ready to offer you
>> opportunities to work full-time on consensus changes.
>> _______________________________________________
>> bitcoin-dev mailing list
>> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>>
>

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 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2023-07-19 20:45   ` Greg Sanders

  2023-07-20  6:11       ` Greg Sanders
  
From: Antoine Riard @ 2023-07-20  5:46 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Greg Sanders;  Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 14862 bytes --]

Hi Greg,

I'm very meeting your development approach with regards to starting smalls
about consensus change primitives, and I think taproot has demonstrated
some good historical process, which has good archives about how development
was conducted (e.g the community-wide taproot review of which the Bitcoin
Contracting Primitives WG was built on this experience [0]).

I don't know about saying that the BOLTs (and its process) should be
authoritative over the running code of implementations. While it's
definitely a mark of some bar of technical review and inter-compatibility,
I think ultimately each BOLT has to be judged individually on its own
technical merits. And I think we had a bunch of cases in the past when "the
map is not the territory". Even there are few areas of critical Lightning
operations which are not documented by the BOLTs to the best of my
knowledge (such as fee-bumping and transactions broadcast reactions as it
was for on-chain DLCs [1]).

Lastly, there is a huge area of uncertainty about the technical fitness of
Simplicity for 2/small party channels. I remember a Russell O'connor
presentation about Simplicity back in Paris (2017 or 2018 ?) and asking him
how it would work in a chain of transactions, while the answer was iirc
"yes it has been designed with this constraint", it's a very open question
when you have off-chain states which advances in independence from the
on-chain state between a dynamic number of counterparties (kinda the
interactivity issue for payment pools). Here I guess you would have to come
to a consensus to the model of logic followed for the analysis of such
distributed systems e.g Leslie Lamport's temporal logic [2]. Additionally,
the theoretical foundations on the Coq prover are still actively studied by
Xavier Leroy at the College de France and some novel insights might be
interesting for using formal verification in terms of Bitcoin consensus
changes development (and I don't know if all the works and lessons have
been translated from French to English).

Best,
Antoine

[0] https://github.com/ajtowns/taproot-review
[1]
https://github.com/discreetlogcontracts/dlcspecs/blob/master/Non-Interactive-Protocol.md
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_logic_of_actions

Le mer. 19 juil. 2023 à 21:45, Greg Sanders <gsanders87@gmail•com> a écrit :

> Hello Keagen,
>
> Most of the complexity of LN cannot be resolved with covenants. Of the
> things that can be simplified in my experience, you're going to need more
> than CTV to get significant gains. And in the end, channels can only get so
> simple since we have many other BOLTs to deal with. And even then, you're
> going to have to convince LN spec writers to include such changes, whatever
> they are, then get deployment.
>
> Step 1 is finding a primitive that seems interesting. It's important to
> moderate enthusiasm for any primitive with reality, and probably by being
> concrete by writing specs that use a primitive, and code it up to discover
> what we're overlooking. We're always overlooking something! In my humble
> opinion these are step 2 and 3 of gathering mind-share.
>
> As a more productive tact, if we're thinking beyond 2/small party
> channels, probably better to snap your fingers, pretend we have Simplicity,
> see what we can build, and work backwards from there to see if we can
> accomplish this within the confines of bitcoin script?
>
> Cheers,
> Greg
>
> On Wed, Jul 19, 2023 at 3:59 PM Keagan McClelland via bitcoin-dev <
> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi Antoine,
>>
>> Thank you for the effort you've put towards this. I generally agree that
>> a smooth functioning Lightning Network is of greater importance than
>> advanced contracting capabilities. However, as I dive deeper into some of
>> the more ambitious goals for LN development I am learning that a great deal
>> of complexity of some current lightning (LN) proposals can be handily
>> discharged with CTV. While I am not intimately familiar with all of the
>> other covenant schemes to the same level of technical proficiency, I have a
>> suspicion that a number of them, if not all of them, are capable of
>> discharging the same flavor and amount of complexity as well. Others should
>> chime in if they can confirm this claim.
>>
>> I have been publicly on the record as supporting the addition of some
>> covenant scheme into Bitcoin for some time and have long held on
>> theoretical grounds that the addition of such a mechanism is both necessary
>> and inevitable if Bitcoin is to survive in the long term. However, as I've
>> started to work more directly with the Lightning protocol, these
>> theoretical and purely logical arguments became far more concrete and
>> immediately beneficial.
>>
>> I say this primarily to challenge the idea that covenants are a
>> distraction from lightning development. It may very well be that your areas
>> of focus on LN preclude you from splitting your attention and none of this
>> email should be interpreted as a criticism of you applying your efforts in
>> the highest leverage manner you can manage. That said, I don't want
>> observers of this thread to walk away with the impression that they are two
>> independent efforts as covenants can significantly contribute to LN's
>> maturity. When and how should they be prioritized? Unfortunately I don't
>> feel able to comment on that at this time. All I know is that Lightning
>> would almost certainly benefit substantially from having a covenant
>> primitive.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Keags
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 18, 2023 at 3:40 PM Antoine Riard via bitcoin-dev <
>> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi list,
>>>
>>> Last year amid the failure of the CTV speedy trial activation and
>>> intense conversations about a rainbow of covenant proposals, I introduced
>>> the idea of a new community process to specify covenants [0]. This post is
>>> to resume the experiment so far and officially mark the process maintenance
>>> as "up for grabs", as I won't actively pursue it further (after wavering on
>>> such a decision a bit during May / June).
>>>
>>> Few of the goals announced at that time were to build a consistent
>>> framework to evaluate covenant proposals, see the common grounds between
>>> proposals if they could be composed or combined by their authors, open the
>>> consensus  changes development process beyond the historical boundaries of
>>> Bitcoin Core and maintain high-quality technical archive as a consensus
>>> discussions have spawned half a decade from intellectual conception to
>>> activation in average (at least for segwit, schnorr, taproot).
>>>
>>> Such effort was a speak-by-the-act answer to the issues in
>>> consensus development changes pointed out by Jeremy Rubin in April of last
>>> year [1]: namely the lack of a "codified checklist" for consensus changes,
>>> that "consensus is memoryless" and "bitcoin core is not bitcoin"
>>> (independently of the technical concerns as I have as limited or
>>> non-adequate primitive for vaults / payment pools I expressed during the
>>> same time). Other complementary initiatives have been undertaken during the
>>> same period, AJ with the bitcoin-inquisition fork where the community of
>>> developers and contracting primitives of researchers on a consensus-enabled
>>> fork of core [2]. And Dave Harding with the careful archiving of all
>>> covenant proposals under the Optech umbrella [3].
>>>
>>> About the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG, a Github repository was
>>> started and maintained to archive and document all the primitives (apo,
>>> tluv, ctv, the taproot annex, sighash_group, CSFS, cat, txhash, evict,
>>> check_output_covenant_verify, inherited ids, anyamount, singletons,
>>> op_vault) and the corresponding protocols (payment pools, vaults,
>>> drivechains, trust-minimized mining pools payouts). We had a total of 6
>>> monthly meetings on the Libera chat #bitcoin-contracting-primitives-wg for
>>> a number of more than 20 individual attendees representing most of the
>>> parts of the community. I think (missing march logs). Numerous in-depth
>>> discussions did happen on the repository and on the channel on things like
>>> "merkelized all the things" or "payment pools for miners payoffs".
>>>
>>> As I've been busy on the Lightning-side and other Bitcoin projects, I've
>>> not run an online meeting since the month of April, while still having a
>>> bunch of fruitful technical discussions with folks involved in the effort
>>> at conferences and elsewhere. I launched the effort as an experiment with
>>> the soft commitment to dedicate 20% of my time on it, after few successful
>>> sessions I think such a process has an interest of its own, however it
>>> comes with direct competition of my time to work on Lightning robustness.
>>> Getting my hands dirty on low-level LDK development recently made me
>>> realize we still have years of titan work to get a secure and reliable
>>> Lightning Network.
>>>
>>> As such, between extended covenant capabilities for advanced contracts
>>> coming as a reality for Bitcoin _or_ LN working smoothly at scale with
>>> 50-100M UTXO-sharing users on it during the next 5-7 years cycle, I think
>>> the latter goal is more critical for Bitcoin existential survival, and
>>> where on a personal title I'll allocate the best of my time and energy (and
>>> somehow it match the "slow" technical activity on bitcoin-inquisition
>>> mostly done by Lightning hands).
>>>
>>> This is my personal conclusion only on the state of Bitcoin
>>> technological momentum, and this is quite tainted by my deep background in
>>> Lightning development. If you've been working on covenant changes
>>> proposals, please don't take it as a discouragement, I think Taproot
>>> (privacy-preserving script policies behind the taproot tree branches) and
>>> Schnorr (for native multi-sig) soft forks have shown how it can improve the
>>> building of self-custody solutions by one or two order of magnitude, and
>>> small incremental changes might be good enough to have a lower technical
>>> consensus bar.
>>>
>>> On my side, I'll pursue pure R&D works on CoinPool, notably coming with
>>> better solutions with the interactivity issue and mass-compression of
>>> withdrawal and design exotic advanced Bitcoin contracts based on the
>>> taproot annex, though more in a "l'art pour l'art" approach for the time
>>> being [4]. Additionally, I might start to submit an in-depth security
>>> review of consensus changes under pseudonyms, it has already been done in
>>> the past and somehow it's good practice in terms of "message neutrality"
>>> [5]. If folks wanna experiment in terms of payment pools deployment, Greg
>>> Maxwell's old joinpool can be used today (and somehow it's worthy of its
>>> own as a net advance for coinjoins).
>>>
>>> I'll honestly acknowledge towards the community, I might have
>>> overpromised with the kickstart of this new process aiming to move the
>>> frontlines in matters of Bitcoin consensus changes development process. On
>>> the other hand, I think enough sessions of the working group have been
>>> runned and enough marks of technical interests have been collected to
>>> demonstrate the minimal value of such a process, so I would estimate my
>>> open-source balance sheet towards the community to be in good standing ?
>>> (open-minded question).
>>>
>>> I don't think Bitcoin fundamentally lacks compelling technical proposals
>>> to advance the capabilities of Bitcoin Script today, nor the crowd of
>>> seasoned and smart protocol developers to evaluate mature proposals
>>> end-to-end and on multiple dimensions with a spirit of independence.
>>> Rather, I believe what Bitcoin is lacking is a small crowd of technical
>>> historians and archivist doing the work of assessing, collecting and
>>> preserving consensus changes proposals and QA devs to ensure any consensus
>>> change proposals has world-class battle-ground testing before to be
>>> considered for deployment, ideally with the best standards of Bitcoin
>>> decentralization and FOSS neutrality [6].
>>>
>>> If you would like to pursue the maintenance and nurturing of the Bitcoin
>>> Contracting Primitives WG (or the bitcoin-inquisition fork or collaborate
>>> with Optech to organize industry-wise workshop on covenants at the image of
>>> what has been done in 2019 for Taproot), that you're willing to show
>>> proof-of-work and you estimate that operational ground, legal information
>>> or financial resources will anchor your individual work on the long-term,
>>> don't hesitate to reach out, I'll see what I can do with a disinterested
>>> mind [7].
>>>
>>> With humility,
>>> Antoine
>>>
>>> [0]
>>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-July/020763.html
>>> [1]
>>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020233.html
>>> [2]
>>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-September/020921.html
>>> [3] https://github.com/bitcoinops/bitcoinops.github.io/pull/806
>>> [4] Version 0.2 of the CoinPool whitepaper addressing most of the
>>> remaining "Big Problems" is still pending on my visit to co-author Gleb
>>> Naumenko in Ukraine, which has been postponed few times in light of the
>>> conflict operational evolutions.
>>> [5] See
>>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2020-February/017614.html.
>>> For the philosophical reasons of doing so, I invite you to read Foucault's
>>> famous essay "Le philosophe masque".
>>> [6] Somehow I come to share Jeremy's thesis's "Product management is not
>>> "my Job" it's yours" in matters of consensus changes. I believe we might be
>>> past the technical complexity threshold where even simple consensus changes
>>> can be conducted from A to Z as a one man job or even by a group of 2/3
>>> elite devs.
>>> [7] I've been reached out multiple times and consistently by R&D
>>> non-profits, plebs whales and VC firms who were interested to commit
>>> resources to advance softforks and covenants in the Bitcoin space, no doubt
>>> when you're reliable and with a track record, folks are ready to offer you
>>> opportunities to work full-time on consensus changes.
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> bitcoin-dev mailing list
>>> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
>>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> bitcoin-dev mailing list
>> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>>
>

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 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2023-07-20  5:46     ` Antoine Riard

  
From: Greg Sanders @ 2023-07-20  6:11 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Antoine Riard;  Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 15344 bytes --]

Hi antoine,

Simplicity was just a stand in for "functionally complete" handwave.

Cheers,
Greg

On Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 1:46 AM Antoine Riard <antoine.riard@gmail•com> wrote:

> Hi Greg,
>
> I'm very meeting your development approach with regards to starting smalls
> about consensus change primitives, and I think taproot has demonstrated
> some good historical process, which has good archives about how development
> was conducted (e.g the community-wide taproot review of which the Bitcoin
> Contracting Primitives WG was built on this experience [0]).
>
> I don't know about saying that the BOLTs (and its process) should be
> authoritative over the running code of implementations. While it's
> definitely a mark of some bar of technical review and inter-compatibility,
> I think ultimately each BOLT has to be judged individually on its own
> technical merits. And I think we had a bunch of cases in the past when "the
> map is not the territory". Even there are few areas of critical Lightning
> operations which are not documented by the BOLTs to the best of my
> knowledge (such as fee-bumping and transactions broadcast reactions as it
> was for on-chain DLCs [1]).
>
> Lastly, there is a huge area of uncertainty about the technical fitness of
> Simplicity for 2/small party channels. I remember a Russell O'connor
> presentation about Simplicity back in Paris (2017 or 2018 ?) and asking him
> how it would work in a chain of transactions, while the answer was iirc
> "yes it has been designed with this constraint", it's a very open question
> when you have off-chain states which advances in independence from the
> on-chain state between a dynamic number of counterparties (kinda the
> interactivity issue for payment pools). Here I guess you would have to come
> to a consensus to the model of logic followed for the analysis of such
> distributed systems e.g Leslie Lamport's temporal logic [2]. Additionally,
> the theoretical foundations on the Coq prover are still actively studied by
> Xavier Leroy at the College de France and some novel insights might be
> interesting for using formal verification in terms of Bitcoin consensus
> changes development (and I don't know if all the works and lessons have
> been translated from French to English).
>
> Best,
> Antoine
>
> [0] https://github.com/ajtowns/taproot-review
> [1]
> https://github.com/discreetlogcontracts/dlcspecs/blob/master/Non-Interactive-Protocol.md
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_logic_of_actions
>
> Le mer. 19 juil. 2023 à 21:45, Greg Sanders <gsanders87@gmail•com> a
> écrit :
>
>> Hello Keagen,
>>
>> Most of the complexity of LN cannot be resolved with covenants. Of the
>> things that can be simplified in my experience, you're going to need more
>> than CTV to get significant gains. And in the end, channels can only get so
>> simple since we have many other BOLTs to deal with. And even then, you're
>> going to have to convince LN spec writers to include such changes, whatever
>> they are, then get deployment.
>>
>> Step 1 is finding a primitive that seems interesting. It's important to
>> moderate enthusiasm for any primitive with reality, and probably by being
>> concrete by writing specs that use a primitive, and code it up to discover
>> what we're overlooking. We're always overlooking something! In my humble
>> opinion these are step 2 and 3 of gathering mind-share.
>>
>> As a more productive tact, if we're thinking beyond 2/small party
>> channels, probably better to snap your fingers, pretend we have Simplicity,
>> see what we can build, and work backwards from there to see if we can
>> accomplish this within the confines of bitcoin script?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Greg
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 19, 2023 at 3:59 PM Keagan McClelland via bitcoin-dev <
>> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Antoine,
>>>
>>> Thank you for the effort you've put towards this. I generally agree that
>>> a smooth functioning Lightning Network is of greater importance than
>>> advanced contracting capabilities. However, as I dive deeper into some of
>>> the more ambitious goals for LN development I am learning that a great deal
>>> of complexity of some current lightning (LN) proposals can be handily
>>> discharged with CTV. While I am not intimately familiar with all of the
>>> other covenant schemes to the same level of technical proficiency, I have a
>>> suspicion that a number of them, if not all of them, are capable of
>>> discharging the same flavor and amount of complexity as well. Others should
>>> chime in if they can confirm this claim.
>>>
>>> I have been publicly on the record as supporting the addition of some
>>> covenant scheme into Bitcoin for some time and have long held on
>>> theoretical grounds that the addition of such a mechanism is both necessary
>>> and inevitable if Bitcoin is to survive in the long term. However, as I've
>>> started to work more directly with the Lightning protocol, these
>>> theoretical and purely logical arguments became far more concrete and
>>> immediately beneficial.
>>>
>>> I say this primarily to challenge the idea that covenants are a
>>> distraction from lightning development. It may very well be that your areas
>>> of focus on LN preclude you from splitting your attention and none of this
>>> email should be interpreted as a criticism of you applying your efforts in
>>> the highest leverage manner you can manage. That said, I don't want
>>> observers of this thread to walk away with the impression that they are two
>>> independent efforts as covenants can significantly contribute to LN's
>>> maturity. When and how should they be prioritized? Unfortunately I don't
>>> feel able to comment on that at this time. All I know is that Lightning
>>> would almost certainly benefit substantially from having a covenant
>>> primitive.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Keags
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jul 18, 2023 at 3:40 PM Antoine Riard via bitcoin-dev <
>>> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi list,
>>>>
>>>> Last year amid the failure of the CTV speedy trial activation and
>>>> intense conversations about a rainbow of covenant proposals, I introduced
>>>> the idea of a new community process to specify covenants [0]. This post is
>>>> to resume the experiment so far and officially mark the process maintenance
>>>> as "up for grabs", as I won't actively pursue it further (after wavering on
>>>> such a decision a bit during May / June).
>>>>
>>>> Few of the goals announced at that time were to build a consistent
>>>> framework to evaluate covenant proposals, see the common grounds between
>>>> proposals if they could be composed or combined by their authors, open the
>>>> consensus  changes development process beyond the historical boundaries of
>>>> Bitcoin Core and maintain high-quality technical archive as a consensus
>>>> discussions have spawned half a decade from intellectual conception to
>>>> activation in average (at least for segwit, schnorr, taproot).
>>>>
>>>> Such effort was a speak-by-the-act answer to the issues in
>>>> consensus development changes pointed out by Jeremy Rubin in April of last
>>>> year [1]: namely the lack of a "codified checklist" for consensus changes,
>>>> that "consensus is memoryless" and "bitcoin core is not bitcoin"
>>>> (independently of the technical concerns as I have as limited or
>>>> non-adequate primitive for vaults / payment pools I expressed during the
>>>> same time). Other complementary initiatives have been undertaken during the
>>>> same period, AJ with the bitcoin-inquisition fork where the community of
>>>> developers and contracting primitives of researchers on a consensus-enabled
>>>> fork of core [2]. And Dave Harding with the careful archiving of all
>>>> covenant proposals under the Optech umbrella [3].
>>>>
>>>> About the Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG, a Github repository was
>>>> started and maintained to archive and document all the primitives (apo,
>>>> tluv, ctv, the taproot annex, sighash_group, CSFS, cat, txhash, evict,
>>>> check_output_covenant_verify, inherited ids, anyamount, singletons,
>>>> op_vault) and the corresponding protocols (payment pools, vaults,
>>>> drivechains, trust-minimized mining pools payouts). We had a total of 6
>>>> monthly meetings on the Libera chat #bitcoin-contracting-primitives-wg for
>>>> a number of more than 20 individual attendees representing most of the
>>>> parts of the community. I think (missing march logs). Numerous in-depth
>>>> discussions did happen on the repository and on the channel on things like
>>>> "merkelized all the things" or "payment pools for miners payoffs".
>>>>
>>>> As I've been busy on the Lightning-side and other Bitcoin projects,
>>>> I've not run an online meeting since the month of April, while still having
>>>> a bunch of fruitful technical discussions with folks involved in the effort
>>>> at conferences and elsewhere. I launched the effort as an experiment with
>>>> the soft commitment to dedicate 20% of my time on it, after few successful
>>>> sessions I think such a process has an interest of its own, however it
>>>> comes with direct competition of my time to work on Lightning robustness.
>>>> Getting my hands dirty on low-level LDK development recently made me
>>>> realize we still have years of titan work to get a secure and reliable
>>>> Lightning Network.
>>>>
>>>> As such, between extended covenant capabilities for advanced contracts
>>>> coming as a reality for Bitcoin _or_ LN working smoothly at scale with
>>>> 50-100M UTXO-sharing users on it during the next 5-7 years cycle, I think
>>>> the latter goal is more critical for Bitcoin existential survival, and
>>>> where on a personal title I'll allocate the best of my time and energy (and
>>>> somehow it match the "slow" technical activity on bitcoin-inquisition
>>>> mostly done by Lightning hands).
>>>>
>>>> This is my personal conclusion only on the state of Bitcoin
>>>> technological momentum, and this is quite tainted by my deep background in
>>>> Lightning development. If you've been working on covenant changes
>>>> proposals, please don't take it as a discouragement, I think Taproot
>>>> (privacy-preserving script policies behind the taproot tree branches) and
>>>> Schnorr (for native multi-sig) soft forks have shown how it can improve the
>>>> building of self-custody solutions by one or two order of magnitude, and
>>>> small incremental changes might be good enough to have a lower technical
>>>> consensus bar.
>>>>
>>>> On my side, I'll pursue pure R&D works on CoinPool, notably coming with
>>>> better solutions with the interactivity issue and mass-compression of
>>>> withdrawal and design exotic advanced Bitcoin contracts based on the
>>>> taproot annex, though more in a "l'art pour l'art" approach for the time
>>>> being [4]. Additionally, I might start to submit an in-depth security
>>>> review of consensus changes under pseudonyms, it has already been done in
>>>> the past and somehow it's good practice in terms of "message neutrality"
>>>> [5]. If folks wanna experiment in terms of payment pools deployment, Greg
>>>> Maxwell's old joinpool can be used today (and somehow it's worthy of its
>>>> own as a net advance for coinjoins).
>>>>
>>>> I'll honestly acknowledge towards the community, I might have
>>>> overpromised with the kickstart of this new process aiming to move the
>>>> frontlines in matters of Bitcoin consensus changes development process. On
>>>> the other hand, I think enough sessions of the working group have been
>>>> runned and enough marks of technical interests have been collected to
>>>> demonstrate the minimal value of such a process, so I would estimate my
>>>> open-source balance sheet towards the community to be in good standing ?
>>>> (open-minded question).
>>>>
>>>> I don't think Bitcoin fundamentally lacks compelling technical
>>>> proposals to advance the capabilities of Bitcoin Script today, nor the
>>>> crowd of seasoned and smart protocol developers to evaluate mature
>>>> proposals end-to-end and on multiple dimensions with a spirit of
>>>> independence. Rather, I believe what Bitcoin is lacking is a small crowd of
>>>> technical historians and archivist doing the work of assessing, collecting
>>>> and preserving consensus changes proposals and QA devs to ensure any
>>>> consensus change proposals has world-class battle-ground testing before to
>>>> be considered for deployment, ideally with the best standards of Bitcoin
>>>> decentralization and FOSS neutrality [6].
>>>>
>>>> If you would like to pursue the maintenance and nurturing of the
>>>> Bitcoin Contracting Primitives WG (or the bitcoin-inquisition fork or
>>>> collaborate with Optech to organize industry-wise workshop on covenants at
>>>> the image of what has been done in 2019 for Taproot), that you're willing
>>>> to show proof-of-work and you estimate that operational ground, legal
>>>> information or financial resources will anchor your individual work on the
>>>> long-term, don't hesitate to reach out, I'll see what I can do with a
>>>> disinterested mind [7].
>>>>
>>>> With humility,
>>>> Antoine
>>>>
>>>> [0]
>>>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-July/020763.html
>>>> [1]
>>>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020233.html
>>>> [2]
>>>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-September/020921.html
>>>> [3] https://github.com/bitcoinops/bitcoinops.github.io/pull/806
>>>> [4] Version 0.2 of the CoinPool whitepaper addressing most of the
>>>> remaining "Big Problems" is still pending on my visit to co-author Gleb
>>>> Naumenko in Ukraine, which has been postponed few times in light of the
>>>> conflict operational evolutions.
>>>> [5] See
>>>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2020-February/017614.html.
>>>> For the philosophical reasons of doing so, I invite you to read Foucault's
>>>> famous essay "Le philosophe masque".
>>>> [6] Somehow I come to share Jeremy's thesis's "Product management is
>>>> not "my Job" it's yours" in matters of consensus changes. I believe we
>>>> might be past the technical complexity threshold where even simple
>>>> consensus changes can be conducted from A to Z as a one man job or even by
>>>> a group of 2/3 elite devs.
>>>> [7] I've been reached out multiple times and consistently by R&D
>>>> non-profits, plebs whales and VC firms who were interested to commit
>>>> resources to advance softforks and covenants in the Bitcoin space, no doubt
>>>> when you're reliable and with a track record, folks are ready to offer you
>>>> opportunities to work full-time on consensus changes.
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> bitcoin-dev mailing list
>>>> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
>>>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
>>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>>>
>>

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