If you weren’t terminally online this weekend, you may have missed the flurry of discussion in favor of OP_CTV. While OP_CAT drives the fork conversation due to the marketing of Taproot Wizards and its popularity in the ordinals community, OP_CTV is a forgotten but more palatable frontrunner option.
Let’s brush up on CTV & take a look at notable talking points from last weekend.
What is OP_CTV?
OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY is a narrowly defined opcode from Jeremy Rubin that enables covenants on Bitcoin. Covenants restrict where coins can be spent in future transactions, and CTV accomplishes this by verifying the template of the future blocks. Author Jeremy Rubin introduced CTV in BIP-119, writing that it “enables several powerful features with minimal risks”. It would enable significant on-chain scaling (especially during high fees), dramatically improve Discrete Log Contracts, improve Lightning channel management (it reduces interactivity!), enable more efficient vaults, and even enable trustless mining pools.
Rubin campaigned for CTV activation a couple years ago, but he dropped his focus after receiving strong criticism and backlash from many in the developer community.
Today, many of those voices who were once critical are now either silent or changing their tune.
Coming out for CTV
The main catalysts for conversation over the past two weeks have been our conference, OP_NEXT & Twitter posts from James O’Beirne, wherein he criticizes complacency in Bitcoin Core.
“Core and ‘graybeard’ devs are not focusing on _the_ fundamental problem in bitcoin: preserving trustless UTXO ownership.”
James calls CTV one of the “primitive building blocks we need to figure out UTXO scaling solutions” and says “time is running out” for scaling solutions in light of increasingly powerful institutional Bitcoin custodians.
This has prompted a cascade of explicitly pro-CTV posts from folks who haven’t taken a progressive stance on forks to-date. Notably, Casey Rodarmor.
Rodarmor, named Coindesk’s “2023 most influential person in crypto,” notably hosted Jeremy Rubin on Hell Money in January of this year – his first podcast or media appearance in almost two years. While Casey has declined to comment on many popular soft fork proposals such as OP_CAT, his hegemony over the ordinals and runes ecosystem speaks volumes (today, for example, Runes account for over half of the transactions on Bitcoin).
On Sunday we saw CalleBTC, the pseudonymous figurehead of all things eCash, come out with explicit support for CTV.
Calle is known as a comparatively conservative Bitcoiner: he’s welcomed on all the hardcore Bitcoin podcasts, he’s celebrated by so-called “laser-eyed maxis,” and he also carries weight with eCash enjoyers. “Everything else has to go through the same hell-scape of infinite vetting, rage quits, comebacks, misrepresentations, FUD campaigns, and grinding consensus-building to earn the confidence that CTV has garnered in the last years,” he said.
Then we have GG (UTXO mgmt). While the developer world may not know him, GG’s quite respected in the Bitcoin mining research community due to his seminal work at his previous employer, Galaxy Digital. This past week, he tweeted, “I’m pro activating CTV NOW!” and I’m pro activating covenants today.”
GG has historically been a slow-and-steady voice in Bitcoin – speaking out against claims that action is needed today. He’s also one of the few voices from the institutional world who has chimed in, a group that has largely been absent from soft fork discussions over the past 2 years.
What happens next?
Honestly, probably nothing – we just keep arguing about it in public until enough folks feel that “rough consensus” has been achieved. Rubin has been maintaining a tracker of which notable voices and stakeholders have come out in support of the proposal, and others have proposed additional consensus tracking on the leading Bitcoin wiki.
It’s probably now moving towards either a goalpost moving phase or bikeshedding hell (see BIP Land for what we mean here), and now it’s incumbent on CTV proponents to figure out how to mobilize people towards their cause. This time may be different, however. This time the BIP author is not also leading the education & promotion campaign. Perhaps like nobility of olde the devs have to choose a champion to fight for them, as the battle is too fierce for any but a seasoned fighter.
Is it urgent that we soft fork? While some like Matt Odell say no, the reality is that if we experience sudden Bitcoin adoption in the next couple of years, many people could already be locked out of UTXO sovereignty.
