While the last year or two have seen a number of proposals for covenant-proposing extensions to Bitcoin, there has always been a suspicion among experts that covenants may be possible without any extensions. Evidence for this has come in two forms: an expanding repertoire of previously-thought-impossible computations in Script (culminating in the BitVM’s project to implement every RISC-V opcode), and a series of “near-misses” by which Bitcoin developers have found ways that covenants would have been possible, if not for some obscure historical quirk of the system.

Ethan Heilman, Avihu Levy, Victor Kobolov and I have developed a scheme which proves this suspicion was well founded. Our…

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