A single missing feature in Bitcoin Script has spawned twelve competing proposals. Cointelegraph Research gives an overview. Recently, the concept of so-called covenants has received renewed attention as Bitcoin development and protocol discussions underwent a renaissance. Covenants could enable and facilitate a wide range of applications, including new trustless and scalable layer 2s, fully non-custodial vaults with more complex spending logic, and more efficient payment channels. However, most paths to implementing this functionality require a soft fork of Bitcoin's consensus rules, a process that would likely spark debate within the community. With the recent diversification of consensus clients into Core and Knots nodes, reaching agreement on such a change has become less likely. In spite of recently pushing for a soft-fork of their own, namely BIP-110, the Knots side tends to advocate for protocol ossification and appears less supportive of facilitating scaling solutions on the base layer. The recent con...