This was a question raised in a recent What Bitcoin Did podcast episode with niftynei. The rest of their discussion around covenants is super interesting too, worth giving it a listen. The question is a variation of what I first thought of when I skimmed through the covenants proposal. I said so at the time on Twitter several months ago.

The basic idea of covenants is that you would have a way to attach conditions to bitcoins. It's an interesting primitive for sure, likely could lead to many useful application features. However it reaks of danger. You have a permissionless decentralised self sovereign digital money that works really well, why on earth would you risk adding permissions to it on the base layer? Surely you would run the risk of not being able to spend your bitcoin some time in the future?

In the podcast they bring up the example of attaching a time lock to some bitcoin, and the question then came up, how would you know if the Bitcoin you just received had conditions attached? Their answer is what I suspected. Essentially you wouldn't know unless your wallet had a feature to show you the covenant. So it's conceivable that you could keep bitcoin literally for years and only discover the covenant when you tried to spend the bitcoin.

They propose to create some sort of standards body for wallets, but as they discuss the idea it rapidly becomes a re-inventing-the-government problem because how do you create such an entity that is decentralised? It would be near impossible.

This is tangential to another problem I previously highlighted, namely that Bitcoin is way too obscure at a technical level. Crypto coins aren't easily explorable like HTTP and HTML. That's a big deal.

Anyway, it's an interesting episode, I'm glad they are at least talking about it, however it's clear there are elite and peasant classes forming in Bitcoin. That's a real shame, but it's also dangerous, no matter who you are.

Just read through the notes section on this website to discover first hand examples that the world is absolutely full of people that want nothing more than to block you from one thing or another.

You might be an elite today, but can you be so sure you'll be an elite next week, next year, in 20 or 100 years? Permissions are dangerous.

There is so much horrible stuff happening in Isreal and Gaza at the minute it's important to highlight some of the inspiring things that are happening too. This is from This Week in Startups podcast recent episode - Startup Nation Deep Dive - Dan Senor Ep#1970.

First a bit of background, here are a lot of people in the west mouthing off without really understanding the history and the subtleties of the situation.

For example people claiming the jews haven't been in the region that long, that they should go home, when in fact there have been jews living in the region since the time of King David ~1000 BC. That's over a thousand years before Islam was even created.

Also many people don’t know there are many arabs that actually live in Israel, around 2 million in total. And they are full citizens. They can hold office in government, be on the supreme court etc. Some areas are extremely diverse. There are tensions now and then of course, but the bigger story, the one that gets missed is that jews and arabs have lived together for literally thousands of years. The current situation of conflict and hate is an anomaly. In the longer arc of time, it has not been the norm.

With that in mind, the story of how the people of Jaffa reacted to the October 7th attacks is quite something. Both communities essentially got together after the attack and created a task force to ensure peace in the region.

From the podcast (0:46:00):

Since October 7th, the Israeli Arab community has so locked arms with the Jewish community against Hamas, in ways that are, I will say, quite inspiring.

In a Jaffa, which is one of the most intermingled Jewish Arab towns, just outside of Tel Aviv, after October 7th the Arab community and the Jewish community were so concerned, because of the Gaza war, that there could be a flare up of tensions again between Jews and Isreali Arabs, that they created, on their own, a citizens bottom up community task force to work on security within Jaffa with each other. So literally days after October 7th, they formed this community, hundreds of them, and they basically said, "we need to stay closely connected. If there is a flare up in Jaffa in either community that threatens either community, we agree that we will work together to prevent that flareup.

And they then formed this task force, reached the mayor...THEY reached out to the major, it wasn’t top down, they setup like this Zoom call or WhatsApp call or something, they had like thousands of people from both communities.

The cohesion of both communities still persists to this day. It’s one of the most moving and inspiring stories coming out of Isreal.