Taproot proposal

[Wind_FURY]

With most of the Bitcoin Core developers remaining neutral,

You say a lot of weird stuff.   Bitcoin Core developers pushed this out, they're not "remaining neutral", that would be a terrible abdication of their responsibility as technical experts.

From my point of view during the Segwit “Saga”, when the call for the USAF was obviously becoming very necessary, most of the Core developers were neutral because of the risks. But reading your reply makes me very confident for the UASF for Taproot, if it’s necessary.

USAF SegWit is not the same as SegWit. The former is a "forced" change, while the later is a change that was achieved via consensus. It is totally reasonable for the devs to advocate for Taproot to be activate, expected actually. For them to advocate for Taproot to activate without clear consensus is another story.

The users/economic majority will have no right to demand for the type of blocks they want, if the miners will not signal readiness for the upgrade? From your point of view, the network should always be under the mercy of the mining cartel? If miners won’t signal for Taproot, we simply accept?

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[nibor]

Just about to start next period with about 40% support..

Unless Binance, ViaBTC, BTC.com and Huobi all jump on board in next few hours not going to lock-in in the 2nd period either.

Which is a worry - as they have all had 2 weeks to schedule updates (and many months to prepare) so indicates they have one of:

• Major technical issues with this update
• Actively disagree with it
• Other revenue generating development work (adding new coins etc...) that they regard as higher priority
• Total apathy to it all

If you are a miner using one of these pools I would encourage you to move to one of the others that are supporting it (see https://taproot.watch/miners - any pool with a green tick).

That should help if issues is 3rd or 4th on above list, and increase hash rate of a signalling pool.

Maybe LukeJr was right ..

[DooMAD]

The users/economic majority will have no right to demand for the type of blocks they want, if the miners will not signal readiness for the upgrade? From your point of view, the network should always be under the mercy of the mining cartel? If miners won’t signal for Taproot, we simply accept?

At least give polite discussions a chance first before we start making "demands" .  If you start seeing everyone as your enemy before they've done anything wrong, that's a great way to create tension and halt any progress you could have made by working in cooperation.

Remember, this is a collaborative network that functions optimally when everyone is in agreement.  It's not constructive to go looking for a dispute that might not exist until you cause it.

[Wind_FURY]

The users/economic majority will have no right to demand for the type of blocks they want, if the miners will not signal readiness for the upgrade? From your point of view, the network should always be under the mercy of the mining cartel? If miners won’t signal for Taproot, we simply accept?

At least give polite discussions a chance first before we start making "demands" .  If you start seeing everyone as your enemy before they've done anything wrong, that's a great way to create tension and halt any progress you could have made by working in cooperation.

Remember, this is a collaborative network that functions optimally when everyone is in agreement.  It's not constructive to go looking for a dispute that might not exist until you cause it.

“Demand” was the wrong word to use, I am sorry, but I believe you understand what the situation is. If the community came into consensus that it wants Taproot, then it should be activated. The miners can’t expect everyone to sit, and wait forever.

[icopress]

“Demand” was the wrong word to use, I am sorry, but I believe you understand what the situation is. If the community came into consensus that it wants Taproot, then it should be activated. The miners can’t expect everyone to sit, and wait forever.

Well, miners have a few more months left to support the update, so the main question is not "if they support" but "when will they support". In addition, I am almost sure that there is no chance that the activation will be disrupted given the share of Chinese pools, (unless someone has some pretty compelling political reasons). Although I'm not entirely sure whether a rollback is advisable in this case, given that against the background of an increase in the hash rate, such actions will lead to a loss of profit, (in the sense that Chinese miners are unlikely to favor pools with an ambiguous position).

[JayJuanGee]

“Demand” was the wrong word to use, I am sorry, but I believe you understand what the situation is. If the community came into consensus that it wants Taproot, then it should be activated. The miners can’t expect everyone to sit, and wait forever.

Well, miners have a few more months left to support the update, so the main question is not "if they support" but "when will they support". In addition, I am almost sure that there is no chance that the activation will be disrupted given the share of Chinese pools, (unless someone has some pretty compelling political reasons). Although I'm not entirely sure whether a rollback is advisable in this case, given that against the background of an increase in the hash rate, such actions will lead to a loss of profit, (in the sense that Chinese miners are unlikely to favor pools with an ambiguous position).

Of course, many of us regular users would like something like this regular taproot upgrade to just go through quickly, since there really have not been any descriptions of reasons to be opposed to it - unless you might just be against anything that might make bitcoin better - which we should anticipate that there are some miners in the space that are of that opinion, whether they add up to more than 10% to cause a failure to reach consensus might be another question.

So surely, I have heard of various giving the benefit of the doubt to miners and mining pools regarding the first difficulty period, but with the passage of time, if we are not really even coming close to 90% signaling, then there could develop decent amounts of frustration that seemingly obvious upgrades are either being gamed in a dickering around kind of way or even that there might be some incompetency in terms of some miners/pools figuring out how to signal in order that the 90% can be achieved and we can move on to the next stage. 

I do appreciate some activism from miners, node operators and even users in this matter, that may well result in some miners just getting pissed off (fairly early.... if we call "now" early) and to demand explanations or to join pools that are signaling for taproot.  Don't fuck around with these pools who are either passive aggressively failing to signal, incompetent to signal or not providing some kind of reasonable explanation why they are currently not signaling. 

If such non signaling pool is able to provide some reasonable and plausible explanation regarding their failure/refusal to signal and to provide a date, such as June 1 or some other date that they will start to signal, then sure, maybe no need to punish such pools, but otherwise, I would think that regular joe blow miners would want to get this update in place ASAP rather than fucking around (or is the expression "dickering"?) with some mining pools who are not being clear about why they have either not already been signaling or provided some kind of explanation with a signaling projection date that it fairly soon in the future.. giving some benefit of the doubt that there might be "other things" going on in the lives of mining pools (and regular peeps involved) blah blah blah..

At this point (only a few weeks into the "ability to signal"), two weeks^tm (or possibly slightly longer) seems reasonable and acceptable to confirm that the poole is going to start signaling for taproot. 

[pooya87]

If the community came into consensus that it wants Taproot, then it should be activated.

Miners are also part of the community, an important part too since they are the ones signalling for the forks not the "social media participants" who may not even own any bitcoin!

As far as signalling goes we know the hashrate percentages but here is the node percentages:
According to https://bitnodes.io/ only 7.60% have upgraded to 0.20.1
According to https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/software.html only 0.9% of all nodes upgraded to 0.20.1

If you are looking for a reason why miners aren't yet jumping on board in this first adjustment period maybe that's the reason.

[fxsniper]

Did Taproot decrease lower the fees?

I think bitcoin now still high fee, if Taproot make fee to low is will better and very great to use often

[gmaxwell]

As far as signalling goes we know the hashrate percentages but here is the node percentages:
According to https://bitnodes.io/ only 16.24% have upgraded to 0.20.1
According to https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/software.html only 7.40% of all nodes upgraded to 0.20.1

If you are looking for a reason why miners aren't yet jumping on board in this first adjustment period maybe that's the reason.

If so, there might be a miscommunication.  The minimum activation height exists because it's known that it takes MONTHS for a substantial fraction of the network to upgrade even when there is some urgent bug.  Plus, the primary advantage of having soft forks triggered by a super-majority hash rate is that they're safe to activate even if relatively few nodes have upgraded (so long as the super-majority hashpower has upgraded).

Maybe it wasn't your point-- but there is no particular reason to wait for nodes.  And, actually 16.2% of listeners on 0.20.1 already sounds pretty fast to me!

[DooMAD]

If the community came into consensus that it wants Taproot, then it should be activated. The miners can’t expect everyone to sit, and wait forever.

Yeah, I understand the point of contingency planning and being prepared for all eventualities.  But at the same time, we don't want to alienate anyone in the process.  If you start talking as though this is a foregone conclusion, miners could conceivably interpret that to mean you have no respect for their opinion, since you haven't really made an effort to find out what their opinion is yet.  If miners aren't supporting it, the first step is to open a dialogue to find out why.  It's a little premature to start talking about options like UASFs.  That sort of talk comes across as unnecessarily hostile.

[pooya87]

Maybe it wasn't your point-- but there is no particular reason to wait for nodes.  And, actually 16.2% of listeners on 0.20.1 already sounds pretty fast to me!

My point was to say that it is not just miners who take time to upgrade their backend and start signalling, it is also the "community" running full nodes.
I've also made a small mistake and reported the wrong percentage, it is actually 7.6% of listening nodes running 0.21.1 (the 16% was for 0.20.1) which is still good for this short time. The other one is also 0.9% which is not as good.

[gmaxwell]

FWIW, 22% of my peers claim to be running 0.21.1 or 21.99.0 (master), may be because I ban a massive amount of fake spy nodes which may be diluting the figures.  I also have tor inbounds which may tend to be more frequently updated.

(To be clear, I don't claim that this little sample is representative, just adding a bit of color)

[ABCbits]

Did Taproot decrease lower the fees?

I think bitcoin now still high fee, if Taproot make fee to low is will better and very great to use often

Yes, because Taproot transaction size is smaller on many cases, although only noticeable on transaction with script which have multiple condition or have many inputs.

I think bitcoin now still high fee, if Taproot make fee to low is will better and very great to use often

IMO Taproot won't bring much impact towards transaction fee, besides it'll take few months to years before wallet supporting Taproot.

FWIW, 22% of my peers claim to be running 0.21.1 or 21.99.0 (master), may be because I ban a massive amount of fake spy nodes which may be diluting the figures.  I also have tor inbounds which may tend to be more frequently updated.

(To be clear, I don't claim that this little sample is representative, just adding a bit of color)

Additional information would be great,
1. What's the number of peer/incoming connection? 10? 100? 1000?
2. How do you ban fake spy nodes? A fixed list from someone else, automatic detection or manually created list by yourself?

[Wind_FURY]

If the community came into consensus that it wants Taproot, then it should be activated.

Miners are also part of the community, an important part too since they are the ones signalling for the forks not the "social media participants" who may not even own any bitcoin!

They are, but signalling for an upgrade is simply signalling their readiness, not if they want to allow, or not to allow to upgrade. It’s not only up to them.

As far as signalling goes we know the hashrate percentages but here is the node percentages:
According to https://bitnodes.io/ only 7.60% have upgraded to 0.20.1
According to https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/software.html only 0.9% of all nodes upgraded to 0.20.1

If you are looking for a reason why miners aren't yet jumping on board in this first adjustment period maybe that's the reason.

That’s why I believe there should be a fierce campaign for community awareness.

Are you OK if miners won’t signal for the upgrade?

[stompix]

BTC.com has also started signaling, this time more convincingly (5/20), probably that lonely block the previous period was indeed a test. With them on board, the problem list is down to two pools that could reach 10% on their own. Binance and ViaBtc, and I'm not surprised at all by the second one.
We're not going to reach 90% this period either, so next one, I just hope we won't have to wait one period/pool.

[nibor]

BTC.com has also started signaling, this time more convincingly (5/20), probably that lonely block the previous period was indeed a test. With them on board, the problem list is down to two pools that could reach 10% on their own. Binance and ViaBtc, and I'm not surprised at all by the second one.
We're not going to reach 90% this period either, so next one, I just hope we won't have to wait one period/pool.

Agree this period looking unlikely.

Other scenario though is that miners start moving from the non-signalling to the signalling pools. Which for them is a relatively minor change.

[Karartma1]

Fair point but a miner must be extraordinarily committed to bitcoin and its underlying values to switch from non-signalling to signalling pools. This would be a great sign anyway, any shift in this sense will be like an act of war towards the pool which refuses to signal the upgrade.
In the end it depends if the miners are here for the cash or the vision (because any pool works for getting cash). On the other side, if non-signalling pool see a decrease in their HP, well, they should get in line and update or they can prepare themselves to lose money.
I like it

[nibor]

Unless Binance, ViaBTC, BTC.com and Huobi all jump on board in next few hours not going to lock-in in the 2nd period either.

BTC.com, ViaBTC and Huobi have all mined one block that is signalling. So if we assume they are in the testing phase and will be onboard in next week all looking good.

Now we just need Binance Pool! (And the testing pools to signal on all bocks).

So looking positive for period 3.... so Mid June....

[Charles-Tim]

Did Taproot decrease lower the fees?

I think bitcoin now still high fee, if Taproot make fee to low is will better and very great to use often

Just as ETFbitcoin explained, it depends.

You can try to make use of the transaction size or weight tools calculator to calculate legacy, nested segwit, native segwit and taproot transaction fee, you can also make use of the public key per input and signature per input to calculate P2SH multisig transactions. If used correctly, you will be able to know the differences in vbytes of each which will determine how transaction fee can be.

I do not have to tell you how legacy address transaction fee will be almost twice that of native segwit addresses and as native segwit transactions have the lowest fee for now, so I will be comparing native segwit transactions with that of taproot.

If you check the transaction vsizes or vbytes of both native segwit and taproot, they are almost the same, but segwit is slightly lower which can be very insignificant. Which means for transaction that require 1 public key, the transaction fee will be almost the same for both native segwit and taproot transactions.

But taproot make use of schnorr signature to make multisig transactions indistinguishable from transactions that require just only 1 public key (normal bitcoin transactions). Multisig transaction fee is higher than normal single wallet transactions, the higher the number of public key required in a transaction, the higher the transaction fee. If segwit transaction is low, but the more the the public key still required for a transaction, the higher the fee, but the fee will be much lower if compared to legacy addresses, but taproot makes the multisig transactions indistinguishable by making use of key aggregation in which the transaction will look like single payment wallet. Which means, increase in the number of public key needed in a transaction still will require the same amount of transaction fee as that of single payment wallet.

Which means taproot reduces the fee of multisig wallets, and making its transaction indistinguishable from other Bitcoin transactions.

[pooya87]

Are you OK if miners won’t signal for the upgrade?

We aren't facing any kind of deadline after which bitcoin ceases to exist if it hasn't upgraded yet! We are also just in the second week after the release of v. 0.21.1 and I'd rather everyone upgraded naturally specially miners who run modified software not just bitcoin core as is.