Thoughts on the Shielded Bitcoin work:- It’s more than a proof of concept. The @allocinitxyz team has done a clever job | Hanami
Thoughts on the Shielded Bitcoin work:
- It’s more than a proof of concept. The @allocinitxyz team has done a clever job of designing this system — kudos!
- There are valid concerns from people like @robin_linus that the cryptography needed for this is still experimental at best. Further, the consensus rules aren't enforced by L1 (an outside layer reads Bitcoin L1 to construct 2nd-layer consensus, much like our work on virtualchains back in 2017).
- The Bitcoin community tends to support such “Bitcoin extension” projects which require no change to Bitcoin. However, having support from Bitcoin L1 for covenants can make life so much easier for shielded BTC.
- L2s, like Stacks, can implement full privacy easily because hardforks are practical and the norm. The key bottleneck for shielded BTC on an L2 is the trust-minimized bridge. Covenants help with that as well.
This is an encouraging step, and I’m sure the authors will address current concerns. We’ll likely see more privacy work around Bitcoin like @Glass_Coins and L2 shielded addresses (Stacks Satoshi Upgrade 3).
If there is one takeaway, it’s this: if you support private Bitcoin, you should support covenants on Bitcoin. They’ll help both L1 BTC privacy and L2 BTC privacy a ton.