Cobra Alerts About New Bitcoin Soft Fork Brewing in the Shadows
A new conflict might be brewing in the bitcoin world. Cobra, the maintainer and owner of the bitcoin.org domain, has alerted about the development of a user-activated soft fork (UASF) for Bitcoin that will be proposed next year by unnamed developers outside the Bitcoin Core project.
In social media, Cobra stated:
Some bitcoiners are going to attempt to soft fork in CTV through a UASF sometime in 2025. Not enough people are paying attention to this.
CTV stands for Check Template Verify, a series of improvements that introduce the concept of covenants to Bitcoin. Covenants are structures that establish spending conditions for the bitcoin stored in a determined wallet. Described by Jeremy Lubin as part of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 119 (BIP 119), these allow for interesting developments to enhance the security of Bitcoin transactions.
One of these is vaults, cold storage addresses with a spending condition forcing users to send transactions to a single predetermined wallet asset. In addition, the user can also cancel these transactions before a predetermined time, allowing for canceling erroneous or malicious transactions.
The biggest drawback of the update is linked to fungibility, as this bitcoin would be siloed in these addresses and could be perceived as less valuable. Additionally, the increased complexity and the introduction of new code to Bitcoin might expose the codebase to attacks that take advantage of the update.
Nonetheless, with a UASF, the node community decides if these new additions are valuable. As a concept, covenants are still under discussion. Some in the community believe that they serve a real purpose and should be included in Bitcoin Core while others state this is a desperate attempt to introduce these features just for the sake of doing it.
Cobra remarked these improvements, if applied, will come from developers not associated with Bitcoin given the risk of facing litigation issues. He had predicted this kind of conflict before, stating that the next Bitcoin great divide would face “ossificationists,” and “improvers.”
