Jeremy Rubin gives (yet another) rundown of CTV, specifically explaining the origins of the OG covenants proposal.
- CTV dates back to 2017 when Jeremy gave a talk about safe covenants at the BPASE conference; from 2018 to 2019 he refined his ideas, and this culminated in OP_CTV, which he applied for a BIP assignment in Jan 2020
- While Rubin was advocating for OP_CTV, he ran into opposition from people who said that his advocacy would interfere with Taproot activation
- While waiting for Taproot to activate, Rubin created Sapio, a programming language for tooling CTV applications
- Taproot activates in Nov 2021 and Jeremey re-ups his advocacy for CTV
- Jeremey pushes for activation in the Spring of 2022, but abandons these attempts and quits Bitcoin Core in Dec 2022
- The code for CTV hasn’t changed since Jeremy introduced the proposal
- Why did CTV fail to get activated? In Rubin’s view, people failed to understand why covenants matter. Detractors also said that it detracted from Taproot, while others FUDed covenants in general.
- Without CTV, we have three paths to covenants: BitVM (possible today, but complicated); FE’d Up Covenants (on-chain is simple but requires trust assumptions); ColliderScript (very expensive and convoluted)
