Bitcoin Contracting Primitives Working Group

THIS PROJECT IS "UP FOR GRABS" - FEEL FREE TO FORK OR ASK MAINTENANCE RIGHTS (edit block 00000000000000000001a38f0cc03b0ab6fa09e3cd2edfdcb9cdfa2cf1a5ec0f: well I'll probably resume the meetings after the summer just busy with other things for now)

The goal of this project is to host R&D production of the Bitcoin protocol development community around contracting primitives powering new class of Bitcoin use-cases (vaults, statechains, payment pools, ...).

By contracting primitives, the scope is left open to encompass a few techniques which have been proposed in the past: covenants, capabilities, transaction introspection, etc.

This project aims to adhere to the following procedural principles:

• openness: all contributors of the Bitcoin technical community are welcome, whatever the level of knowledge and experience
• decentralization: project maintenance will be distributed among stakeholders over time
• neutrality: ideas should be presented according to the best engineering and scientific standards among the Bitcoin protocol development community in an objective fashion

Principles that require wider interpretation are left to everyone's personal subjectivity. As in matters of FOSS standards, the performance of them is a function of how much stakeholders contribute time and energy in a best effort.

Softwork activation discussion or primitives deployment timeline are considered as off-topic for this project.

The repository organization proposed is the following:

• use-cases: use-cases presentations, contracting primitives usage justification, use-case analysis
• constraints: design bounds historically raised by the community about new contracting primitives
• primitives: proposed changes to Bitcoin such as TLUV, APO, CTV, CSFS

It should be noted that use-case analysis (economic, security, privacy, ... trade-offs) aims to be deliberately exhaustive, as a use-case architecture could potentially be revealed to be non-functional or present a trade-off downside nullifying the technical interest and hence reducing the relevance of the contracting primitive.

Regular meetings are organized on #bitcoin-contracting-primitives-wg on Libera Chat.

The past meetings logs are available: available.

Additionally, there are more Libera Chat channels to discuss advanced plumbery:

• eltoo (anyprevout & eltoo constructions)

• coinpool-dev (payments pools/coin pools)

Pull requests, issues and reviews are welcome, seeking feedback from community stakeholders.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.