Builder: Stu
Language(s): Rust
Contributes To: CTV Prototypes, Char Community
Work(s/ed) At: ZBD
Earlier than Bitcoin, Stu spent his days working as a Home windows System Administrator and in IT Help. His routine consisted of lengthy boring days of sitting in a chair participating in monotonous upkeep work, reconfiguring programs, and resetting passwords for customers who’d forgotten them.
It was the type of job the place an issue occurring that truly requires you to interact your consideration in a significant manner is so uncommon an prevalence that you just wind up sitting round hoping for one thing like that to occur more often than not.
Stu spent most days simply searching by means of Reddit threads throughout his copious quantities of downtime. However this turned out to not be such a foul state of affairs in the long run, as this was how Stu discovered himself pulled into the Bitcoin house round 2017.
Like many Bitcoiners, or reasonably soon-to-be Bitcoiners, again in that interval, Stu received sucked into the Preliminary Coin Providing (ICO) and altcoin frenzy of the time. Additionally, like many Bitcoiners round that point, he wound up getting burned financially by some dangerous investments in random unknown initiatives through which he in all probability shouldn’t have invested within the first place.
Inevitably the gravity of Bitcoin pulled him down the proverbial rabbit gap.
After just a few years of studying extra deeply about Bitcoin, Stu hit a interval of frenzy and stop his job on the peak of the 2021 bull market to search for alternatives to work within the Bitcoin house. By that point the programming language Rust had develop into broadly utilized in completely different Bitcoin initiatives and libraries, so Stu started studying it in order that he may contribute to Bitcoin.
In direction of the tip of 2022, his seek for a job within the house ended when he was employed by Michael Tildwell to work at ZBD, an organization that integrates bitcoin funds into videogames utilizing the Lightning Community.
Working At ZBD
Stu labored DevOps at ZBD, however in his free time he stored working at prototype Rust initiatives.
“Most of my side projects are related to what I was interested in at the time, as I was working at ZBD I started making games that could use bitcoin,” Stu informed Bitcoin Journal.
To begin, he constructed a multiplayer net recreation, rain.run, based mostly round gamers amassing lightning bolts for rewards in satoshis, to get extra accustomed to constructing purposes which have to speak to one another over a community. Afterwards he constructed a easy connect4 recreation performed over the Nostr protocol.
“[This] was a great way to learn how Nostr worked,” mentioned Stu.
“I attended btc++ in Austin in 2024, which was the Script edition.” The 4 day convention was probably the most dense discussion board for dialogue round Bitcoin script enhancements and covenants within the final yr or so.
“There seemed to be, at the time, some kind of consensus developing for covenants on Bitcoin,” recalled Stu.
“This got me really interested in how Bitcoin script worked and [led] me to experimenting with Taproot and Bitcoin scripts…” he added.
“I didn’t really end up with much but it was a great way to learn how scripts worked.”
TABConf, Fee Swimming pools, and CTV
In 2024, Stu attended TABConf, one other developer-focused convention, which is held yearly in Atlanta, Georgia. The conversations in Atlanta additionally revolved closely round covenants.
Like all developer-focused conferences, TABConf placed on a hackathon. Stu selected to construct a venture utilizing Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs), which enabled customers to wager on the result of chess matches. It turned very apparent to Stu that constructing software program round pre-signing giant numbers of transactions launched a variety of complexity for builders.
Discussing this subject, he mentioned: “The answer to this problem seemed to be CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (CTV). As I wanted to learn more about covenants, CTV seemed like a good place to start, so I started integrating CTV into my DLC chess project. I couldn’t believe how simple it made everything…”
Stu went on to construct a proof-of-concept prototype of a Fee Pool utilizing CTV. Fee swimming pools are a really fundamental layer 2 system the place teams of bigger than two share management over a single unspent bitcoin output.
“One way we can scale bitcoin to be used by everyone, without using centralized third parties, is for users to share UTXO’s,” he mentioned when requested why he selected to work on a proof-of-concept for a fee pool. “Payment pools are a great way to do this, especially alongside other layer 2 solutions such as Lightning or Ark.”
Covenants
Covenants have develop into a contentious subject within the dialogue about the place to take Bitcoin going ahead. Each developer has their private opinion on them, and Stu isn’t any exception.
“I think using covenants to replace pre-signed transactions alone is an amazing improvement for developers to build faster and safer,” he mentioned. “It removes a lot of interactivity and friction for users, so there is less need for them to be online or coordinate with other parties, which can improve the user experience by a great deal.”
I requested him if that is what drew him to constructing proof-of-concepts and prototypes utilizing CTV versus different covenant proposals.
“I was drawn to CTV because it was so simple to implement in the applications I wanted to build. Once I built the payment pool with CTV, I was planning on doing the same for all covenant proposals. I figured out how to get the exact same functionality with CAT, but it just took a very long time to get working, and added way more code. The Bitcoin script was like 50 lines of code, compared to CTV with like 3 lines.”
“I’m pretty sure there is consensus between protocol developers that there is no risk to Bitcoin if we enabled CTV…” he mentioned. “…so the argument now seems to be that the users don’t want it. But the users are already using applications and protocols such as Lightning and multisig vaults that would be improved by CTV. So…I think it should be the priority for the next soft fork…”
When requested in regards to the present contentious nature of the dialogue round covenants and the subsequent smooth fork, and the way the environment could possibly be improved, he had this to say:
“Someone needs to get Saylor to tweet a sandwich emoji and everything will be good.”
“But seriously, I don’t really know. Maybe more in person events where people can discuss face to face would help. It doesn’t seem like much of a technical reason that we aren’t making progress, more of a political one,” he went on to say in a extra critical tone.
“I think some of the hesitance is more around making any change at all to Bitcoin. The reason it is so hard to change is an amazing property of Bitcoin, but it doesn’t have to extend to soft forks quite so much. It causes a lot of stress for certain Bitcoin developers, especially Bitcoin Core maintainers. Everyone is waiting on their opinion on the next fork, which seems to make them hesitant on joining in the conversation at all, which makes it hard to get consensus on any new change,” he mentioned.
The Future
Stu not too long ago participated within the Bitcoin Open Supply Software program (BOSS) program by Chaincode Labs, a program designed as a manner for builders new to the Bitcoin ecosystem to chop their enamel and shortly develop a deeper understanding of and expertise with constructing on Bitcoin.
Going ahead Stu goes to contribute to the Char Community, a considerably off the radar effort to construct a brand new bitcoin staking platform led by Jeremy Rubin, the developer who designed and proposed CTV. He plans to proceed engaged on his private facet initiatives and contributing to open supply initiatives as properly, with the eventual objective of beginning to contribute to Bitcoin Core itself.
Stu had this to say about Bitcoiners’ priorities going into the longer term:
“Our number one focus should be on making self custody better. It really sucks right now, and I think more Bitcoiners in general need to admit that. Backing up 12 words does sound simple, but it really isn’t that easy, and no one is doing it.”
