Backing the Last Soft-Fork: Adam Back Champions Covenant Opcodes

Adam Back, co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, has expressed support for covenant opcodes as a potential solution to reduce frequent soft forks in Bitcoin. He sees this as a possible 'last soft-fork' that could improve security while minimizing future protocol changes.

Covenant opcodes would allow scripts to influence the direction of coins after they've been spent, enhancing security through formal semantics and mathematical proofs. Back's position is based on two key ideas: reducing the need for new soft forks and increasing script security.

Back has a long-standing preference for modular opcodes over specific approaches, which he believes can be combined in various ways to create more flexibility. He advocates for building a general toolkit once and verifying it rigorously, allowing future innovation to occur on top of it.