The conservative choice CTV, Check Template Verify, is the most conservatively designed covenant proposal ever seriously considered for Bitcoin. It commits to the outputs of a transaction, a few fields like sequence and locktime, and nothing else. No input transaction IDs. No flexibility. If the transaction outputs don't match the committed template exactly, it fails. That's it. This conservatism is a feature, not a bug. By not committing to inputs, CTV enables something that was previously impossible: payment constructions that can be settled from any unspent output. This solves one of the fundamental problems of off-chain protocols, the input malleability problem where you cannot predict in advance which input will be used to fund a transaction that exists in a larger protocol tree. Lightning, Ark, payment pools, and congestion control trees all benefit from this property. The irony that Moonsettler keeps returning to is that by rejecting CTV and pushing for more expressive alternatives, Bitcoin developers actually increased the risk of the outcomes they claimed to fear. More expressive covenants make it easier to build the kind of exogenous token protocols and ordinal-like systems that the conservative wing of Bitcoin maximalism despises. The conservative choice was always CTV. The people who killed it in the name of conservatism may have handed victory to the people they were trying to stop. Bitcoin Takeover S16E65 with @4moonsettler