Covenant Script: is it a upgrade or a new risk?

To make Bitcoin transactions more secure, developers have come up with something called Covenant Script. This new scripting concept can put limits on how Bitcoin's UTXOs (Unspent Transaction Outputs) can be used in the future. Typically, when you send Bitcoin, anyone can spend that output later, as long as they have the right signature. But with Covenant, you can set rules like: "This output can only be spent in the future with this specific script or type of output." So, it kind of adds a "rule" or "condition" that controls how Bitcoin moves. Even though Covenant scripts (like OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY, OP_CAT, or OP_TXHASH codes) are opening doors for new scaling and privacy tools like Ark, Vault, and Channel Factory, there’s still some skepticism. Some concerns are pretty significant: ▫️ Since Covenant lets anyone create scripts that direct transactions to certain addresses or conditions, it risks letting governments or major entities enforce address lists with "whitelists/blacklists." If misused, it could hurt Bitcoin's fungibility and independence. ▫️ There’s also the chance of poorly designed Covenants leading to "recursive" ones, meaning a Covenant keeps imposing rules on future UTXOs, like a self-replicating script. This can cause unexpected loops in scripts, complicating node verification and potentially causing issues in the network.

This is nonsense and not a valid concern. The government and organizations already do this. Private companies can also do this. The way it is done is by centralized methods. All covenants would do is improve all of these existing methods, that are already used, and make them decentralized. If any upgrade is designed incorrectly it can cause small to catastrophic issues, this is not something that is convenant specific. Don't ask LLMs like ChatGPT about advanced subjects like this. They respond with generic concerns with have many flaws if analyzed well, they hallucinate all the time. Stop relying on them.

Did you just respond with your alt account?   Tagged both accounts. It is not. Stop exaggerating everything. This "systemic risk" is not anything specific to covenants it is present in all feature additions and further it is always present due to the very nature of Bitcoin itself. Anyway many outputs are "locked", either by technical error or by key loss. Stop spreading misinformation.

Smart contract on layer one is a No to me. But I understand it's utility and find it as a good direction if properly implemented Maybe on separate layer say Layer two. In my opinion, There's always a price. The simplicity of Bitcoin is one it's strength. You can check out this thread. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5220520.0

The "problem" here is that we don't have perfect Layer 2's still, and covenants could enable better ones. Still hoping for hashrate escrows / Drivechain but this proposal is almost 10 years old now. With a limited set of covenants we could get finally Ark taking off (e.g. with OP_CTV) and also some new sidechain and rollup ideas would benefit from it. I understand however the concerns regarding recursive covenants. This could lead slowly to a separate Bitcoin universe with some coins only being able to transferred with other rules which could never be changed again. So I would prefer a very restricted proposal. Some rollup ideas like this one rely on recursive covenants, so other alternatives should be researched. It would be interesting as a thought experiment what would happen if we had such a "walled garden" of "restricted covenant coins for life" ("covenantBTC") and they compete with regular BTC: would they diverge into different currencies with different prices, transforming the covenantBTC effectively into an altcoin? One could argue for example that a covenantBTC is less flexible than a "vanilla BTC" and thus should have a lower value. If less people accept the "covenantBTC", that would reduce the incentive for Bitcoin users to create recursive covenants with these characteristics. Perhaps this would mean that the fear of recursive covenants is exaggerated? I have still not found an answer for that. The government example doesn't really convince me. If people are so scared about governments banning an "unseizable" Bitcoin, they must acknowledge that these governments could also ban generally all coins which don't offer blacklisting, so for example only ERC-20 tokens could be permitted.

Satofan44, I don't know if you considered my post as given by AI. But I read some recent articles about Covenant Script Bitcoin Covenants: What Are They And What Do They Do?, Bitcoin Covenants where various people mentioned various positive and ethical aspects. In that case, I also observed deeply and realized that the matter is not a concern at all but it has played a major role in the proper management of money management. There are many people in our forum who are much more knowledgeable than many on this subject. I only presented my own thoughts to get their opinions so that if I am wrong somewhere, I can correct them. If you think that these are created by AI (ChatGpt), then you can check. nutildah sir, you may have given me Neutral Trust based on this opinion of Satofan44 but I never prepared this post of mine by ChatGpt.

You should not be concerned with things that are not part of your expertise and which go beyond your head. Therefore, you are wasting the time of technical contributors and your own time by getting worried about things which you are not able to understand fully. This is a frequent error committed by common folk. The internet and social media has given you the impression that you should have an opinion on everything which is wrong. There are people who are much smarter than you and whose daily job is considering potential attack vectors and security issues working on this. What makes you think that YOU, a random person with no expertise in these fields, will know better than those who work on such things their whole lives? I have explained already in less technical ways how these issues are not as grave as you make them out to be, and that any previously added feature to Bitcoin could have caused a different kind of catastrophe if it were very poorly designed. Let the experts do their job. You can come and participate in technical review only if you become one of the experts yourself. Please just stop, thank you.

Out of all the scripts and sigops added to bitcoin in later years, which one has been useful. Close to none. We've not seen any legitimate usage other than utilizing OP space to abuse segwit discounts from idiots that want to push monkey JPEGs in the bitcoin Blockchain. Satoshi did indeed include scripting in his vision, but when he realized of the potential abuse and how it would harm bitcoin's immutability, he had completely disabled almost all of the scripting on bitcoin. We need to realize that scripts are not important in order to build an truly immutable way to transact. Marginal use cases should not concern everyone securing the chain by mining or running a node. Keep it simple and keep it decentralised.