Hi, Recent advances in the development of Eltoo Lightning channels have envisioned the usage of the Taproot annex as a transaction endpoint where to store specific protocol payload. [0] Further, during the past years, some use-cases such as SIGHASH_GROUP/SIGHASH_BUNDLE have been proposed that would require an extension of transaction fields. [1]. While there is already the nSequence field serving as an endpoint for enforcement of new consensus semantics, the 32 bits of space doesn't allow multiple semantics to be enforced on a transaction in a composable way. [2]
The Taproot softfork paved the way by introducing the annex, a tagged element part of any SegWit v1 spends: "a reserved space for future extensions". This proposal introduces a Type-Length-Value format for the annex field, motivated by its backward-compatibility and parsing straightforwardness. There are a WIP implementation and a BIP available: https://github.com/bitcoin-inquisition/bitcoin/pull/9 https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1381 For now, the proposal is minimal, seeking feedback in the TLV format is an interesting direction. More advanced design questions are also open, like what policy/consensus rules should be envisioned to prevent DoS of any kind and how to make the annex field accessible to Script programmers (e.g PUSH_ANNEX_RECORD). Few use-cases could be served by the annex. Per-input lock-time: as of today absolute timelocks are enforced at the transaction level preventing aggregation of timelocked inputs by a non-coordinating set of signers. Commitment to historical block hash: signing the block hash could prevent a transaction to be replayed or fee snipped in case of persistent forks. Group of inputs/outputs: a group of input-outputs could be bundled and signed together to enable non-interactive fee-bumping batching of off-chain protocols. Vectors of scriptPubkeys/amounts: within an off-chain protocol, a set of signers can commit a priori to individual withdrawal ability, of which the aggregation is enforced by the Script interpreter. [3] The described use-cases are more whiteboard ideas than anything. It would be interesting to dig in the archives of the ML and other Bitcoin research venues, if there are forgotten requests of transaction fields extensions. >From my perspective, I would say there are years of R&D work, before the annex can be considered ready for activation. Detailing the annex format now could harmonize its usage by application only leveraging policy-only enforcement of the field, without having ulterior consensus validation nullifying or interfering with the use. Cheers, Antoine [0] https://github.com/instagibbs/bolts/blob/eltoo_draft/XX-eltoo-transactions.md [1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-July/019243.html [2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0068.mediawiki [3] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-February/019926.html
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