The path to general computation on Bitcoin (with OP_CAT)

[victorkstarkware]

@moonsettler

Curiously LNhance enables both covenants with CTV and CSFS and multi-commitments with PAIRCOMMIT. Yet it does not give us functional STARK proofs as far as I know. I am intrigued by the crucial piece missing. Is it the simple act of concatenation in the end?

For STARK proof verification, we need three things:

1. Carry data between transactions (to split the verifier into multiple transactions). This is because working with a 1000-element size stack is very limiting
2. Being able to Merkle-decommit data and perform algebraic checks on it
3. Derive randomness from a Fiat-Shamir hash accumulation

I think PAIRCOMMIT doesn’t give you item 2, but maybe it’s fine if you store only 4 bytes of elements per leaf. Even then, I am not sure how to use it to achieve item 3 (because the hash, which is a large element, is used to derive other data for the rest of the protocol)

Regarding item 1, I am not sure how to achieve this with CTV+CSFS alone