Bitcoin Forum

Schnorr is coming...

In fact, the bitcoin upgrade arguably took its most significant step yet toward implementation last week when influential developer Pieter Wuille unveiled a draft outlining its technical makeup. With the release, the idea, one that's been in the works by bitcoin developers for years, is one step closer to improving the scaling and privacy of the world's most valuable cryptocurrency.

Effectively, this sets up Schnorr as the next big change to bitcoin, meaning it will be the largest code change since Segregated Witness (SegWit), a pivotal bug fix that prompted a drawn-out battle in the bitcoin community last year before ultimately being adopted.

At a technical level, adding support for Schnorr, a digital signature scheme, would give bitcoin users a new way to generate the cryptographic keys they need to used to store and send bitcoin. By doing so, it also paves the way for a number of exciting benefits, including tackling privacy and scalability, arguably two of bitcoin's most worrisome problems.

"It is a building block for a variety of improvements," Wuille told CoinDesk, adding there are even some further-out improvements that haven't gotten a lot of attention quite yet. And while Wuille hopes the change will ultimately be adopted, he added it's "ultimately up to the users" if they want to adopt it - as was the case with SegWit.

Co-authored by several top bitcoin developers, including the likes of Bitcoin Core contributor Johnson Lau and Gregory Maxwell, the technical, math-ridden proposal outlines the exact signature scheme that could be coded in bitcoin.

And while it's far from that final goal, it's a necessary piece.

Blockstream engineer and co-author Jonas Nick told CoinDesk:

"Standardizing Schnorr for bitcoin is a big step towards using it in bitcoin."

See more: https://www.coindesk.com/schnorr-is-looking-poised-to-become-bitcoins-biggest-change-since-segwit/

Shit, did they actually bother to talk to Bitcoin's developers!!!? What the fuck is going on in the cryptocurrency press, they NEVER talk to the Bitcoin devs

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Schnorr sigs will be a significant change (although I'm not convinced about Coindek.com's assertion that the code will change alot, apparently the secp256k elliptic curve library, written specifically for Bitcoin, will still be used for Schnorr sigs).

Enabling signature aggregation (where 1 signature can be computed for several private keys) will make privacy schemes easier and more attractive, but more importantly will actually improve Bitcoin's scaling factor. So few people ever say anything about this: just changing the blocksize means using more resources at the exact same scale i.e. changing the blocksize does not change the scale. This improvement (where the average signature size is reduced by 25-30%) means that the current Bitcoin maximum block limit of 4MB can fit more transaction information into it, hence this is an actual scaling solution.