On the possibility of evil covenants and implications for soft fork proposals

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@gmaxwell

The productive use of covenants can also almost always be accomplished with some compromise via multisig. There are reasons that it’s not quite symmetrical (evil overlord loses only some uptime guarantees with multisig, while honest covenant user takes an addition security risks) but I do think it’s fair to say that any proposal for increased functionality which could be emulated with some kind of multisig oracle but isn’t should explain why the public should believe that their application is so important and yet no one is doing it via emulation.

Multisig and pre-signed transactions are used (mainnet) for several things that would benefit from covenants. Adding an oracle only makes things worse.

In fact, we have more PoCs to test covenants (pool, vault, ark etc.) than any other soft fork in the last 10 years.