Newsletters
»
Weekly 12
»
#03
A new paper by Ethan Heilman , Victor Kolobov, Avihu Levy and Andrew Poelstra introduces a method to enforce Bitcoin covenants without protocol changes by using hash collision-based checks to enable signature evaluation within covenant scripts, allowing for introspection and enhanced transaction control.
colliderscript.co
🔗
ColliderScript: Covenants in Bitcoin via 160-bit hash collisions
The most direct way to enable covenants would be to extend the Bitcoin Script language to include transaction introspection opcodes, which directly copy transaction data onto the stack to be processed by other opcodes. A less direct way would be to heal the split between Big Script and Small script, e.g. by enabling the OP CAT concatenation opcode. However, any changes to Bitcoin must have consensus across all economic stakeholders, and because of the controversy around covenants in particular, consensus on any changes may not be achieved quickly.
