Importantly, the technique would not require changes to Bitcoin's main underlying code, a notoriously fraught process where consensus is typically seen as the threshold required to greenlight major upgrades known as a "soft fork." The announcement was detailed on Thursday in a research paper titled, "ColliderScript: Covenants in Bitcoin via 160-bit hash collisions." The publication comes as Bitcoin, the oldest and largest blockchain, has attracted hordes of developers trying to add programmability and additional network layers that could lead to not only more applications being built atop the peer-to-peer network but also faster and cheaper venues for transaction execution.