• DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-70278-0_12
• Corpus ID: 18101154

Enhancing Bitcoin Transactions with Covenants

@inproceedings{OConnor2017EnhancingBT,
  title={Enhancing Bitcoin Transactions with Covenants},
  author={Russell O'Connor and Marta Piekarska},
  booktitle={Financial Cryptography Workshops},
  year={2017}
}

• Russell O'Connor, M. Piekarska
• Published in
  Financial Cryptography…
  3 April 2017
• Computer Science, Mathematics

Covenants are Bitcoin Script programs that restrict how funds are allowed to be spent. In previous work [9], Moser et al. implemented covenants with a new Script operation that allows one to programmatically query the transaction. In this paper, we show that covenants can be implemented with a new CHECKSIGFROMSTACK operation that verifies a signature for a message passed as an argument. When the same public key and signature is used together with CHECKSIG, one can recover transaction data, which then allows one to enforce a covenant. To illustrate our technique, we reimplement Moser et al.’s vault construction for securing funds against key compromise. We use Elements Alpha, a sidechain whose Script language has the needed operations.