Fossil record doesn't negotiate. Our ancestors ate specific animal parts until human-specific traits evolved. "Covenants" are just arbitrary constraints fighting millions of years of natural selection.

sovereignty of the receiver of funds in bitcoin is right there baked into the very title of the paper - peer to peer. not client-server. the distinction is not rocket science. all nodes of the UTXO graph must remain sovereign. covenants break this invariant. taproot *already* allows a kludgy form of covenant, it's not been used much because it's more awkward. but it's a violation of the guarantees of a PEER TO PEER electronic cash system. any fork of bitcoin that breaks this, breaks the fundamental architectural principle of the original design, and thus cannot be called bitcoin, or considered to be a bitcoin. the mental gymnastics of people who are cheering for core's clear ongoing effort to break the peer to peer invariant of the architecture of bitcoin is absolutely mind boggling. and it should be pointed out that PEER TO PEER is exactly what central banking systems ARE NOT. they are client server. server is the central bank, commercial banks are the clients. and they propagate that downstream, the clients ownership of their deposits is NOT sovereign, and that's to stop "bank runs" which exposes the fundamental violation of human rights that the entire system exists to perpetuate. it's not optional, it's not irrelevant, and anyone who accepts breaking the contract that bitcoin is always peer based and not role based, just doesn't deserve bitcoin, and they are happily watching it be stepwise mutated into a central bank controlled by blockstream. most shitcoins are precisely this - a travesty of the central bank-client bank-customer architecture. the central bank gets rich, pays off the client banks enough to make it worth being in the conspiracy, and the customer is robbed.