Suspend your personal bias about Andreas, this is a detailed explanation of Covenants and BIP119 CTV.
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RT @europeanhodler
Have you heard about the BIP 119 controversy?
Here is excellent information about it. Watch it and decide for yourself.
(minute 2 to minute 40)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAE5fOZ2Luw&t=16s
https://twitter.com/europeanhodler/status/1519983868195004416

There is a controversy around covenants.

Recursive covenants could implement white lists and black lists of pre-approved addresses, and non-approved addresses, or two different categories of spendable #bitcoin. This would makes bitcoin non-fungible.

You may end up creating a situation when you can not only limit the next transaction, but limit it in such a way that it limits the transaction after it, which limits the transaction after it etc.

For example, this output has a covenant that only allows it to be sent by a transaction who's output has a covenant. And what is the covenant in that transaction? It's a restriction that its output has a covenant on the next transaction etc.

By creating recursive covenants you can basically impose restrictions on #bitcoin transactions that carry forward, perhaps in perpetuity, depending on how this is implemented. And the concern is that this can happen inadvertently.

You've created #bitcoin that can be sent to anyone, and #bitcoin that can only be sent to a specific list of addresses. You could theoretically have that list of addresses be a Merkle tree, which means it can be a very big list of pre-approved addresses.

Andreas is not saying BIP119 does this. He's saying that's one of the concerns about the power of recursive covenants.

There is controversy around covenants. Some are strongly for covenants, and some are strongly opposed to covenants.

This could be used to essentially shut down exit ramps in #bitcoin. To make it such that features of the banking system becomes built in features into #bitcoin. Which means hey are enforced in the scripting language, by the miners.

You'll end up with PayPal.
This is how you kill #Bitcoin.

But this doesn't mean that Andreas is against BIP119 but that's not the controversy. He is not, because he doesn't know if it can be used to implement these kinds of covenants.

But here is the problem; He's not sure.

Do you understand for sure, the exact implications how CTV might be or not be open to the types of recursive covenants described above?

The real controversy is that the author of BIP119, really wants this activated, and activated soon. Jeremy has built an entire set of use cases, presentations, videos and including an entire business that allows you to design smart contracts with a number of use cases.

The main controversy is that Jeremy wants to activate this now by the Speedy Trial process which was used to activate Taproot.

Speedy Trial was a limited time activating mechanism showing gauging miner support of a specific feature of a soft fork, which are opt-in. This is showing the miner's ability to enforce this these rules.

After 3 years of extensive development, testing, and discussions, Taproot became a feature set for soft fork. At the end of this very long process bitcoin developers, exchanges, wallets, users, overwhelmingly supported it. And then we went to the miners as a last step.

In the case of BIP119, however, is that this hasn't happened. We don't have overwhelming support by Bitcoin Core devs, by devs in the Bitcoin mailing list, devs in the ecosystem, by wallets, exchanges, we haven't built that overwhelming support.

If we simply jump to the last stage where we ask the miners, and the miners activate and enforce that, there is very little way for the users who do not support this change to fight back. That's the problem with Speedy Trials.

These are the 5 constituencies of consensus. These are all of the people who have to agree for a change in #bitcoin to be uncontroversial and to proceed without resulting in a split, a hard-fork of #bitcoin into two forks. #Bitcoin with and #bitcoin without the feature.

You can have any one of these constituencies can pull a veto, and it takes overwhelming support by all of these constituencies. This goes to the fundamental question of who makes these decisions, who can make a change to #Bitcoin?

The bottom line is that if the miners activates something that isn't popular, and none of the economic activity follows them, the exchanges don't endorse it, and the users, the wallets, and the developers don't continue developing, what they end up doing is create a fork.

And that fork becomes less popular, less valuable, less interesting, and less used by everybody else.

If there is a controversial change like that, now there's a sixth constituency;

Node Devs.

Let's say BIP119 goes to vote under speedy trial and you object to BIP119, what do you do about it?
You hope that exchanges, merchants, developers also say no, but as a user, all you can do is vote with your wallet.