19 ms·
Bitcoin Core: Bitcoin Core 0.21.1 released with Taproot activation code
- xiphias2 6y agohttps://taproot.watch https://taproot.watch already shows Taproot activations by blocks and miners.
- sp332 6y agoAm I misreading this or does it say that Taproot will not be activated? It needed 90% of the blocks and already 11% have not signaled.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ComputerGuru 6y agoThis cycle. This was just released, so it’ll take a while to get deliberate/representative numbers.
- pstrateman 6y agoNot within this activation window. But maybe the next one.
- sp332 6y agoOh, there's a certificate issue. I was wondering why Smart Screen was giving me a hard time about the download even though I was... fairly sure it was legit.
- seibelj 6y agoTaproot is essential as it will enable “scriptless scripts” which means transactions can accomplish complex code without appearing any different from normal transactions. Use cases include better mixers, cross-chain atomic swaps, and more efficient transactions.
- snypher 6y ago>transactions can accomplish complex code without appearing any different from normal transactions What could go wrong I guess. Are there distinct advantages to this?
- doomroot 6y agoYes, it helps on chain privacy. It’s currently really easy to spot a lightning network channel funding transaction. In the future these will all look like normal transactions. This softfork also provides the necessary tools to make pay-join economically advantageous.
- ur-whale 6y ago> Are there distinct advantages to this? It improves fungibility (if that's even a word).
- rocqua 6y agoNote that, once the transaction is spent, it will be clear that it was a script spend, and some of the script will also be revealed.
- runeks 6y ago> […] some of the script will also be revealed. nullc seems to be saying that revealing (part of) the script isn’t necessary in case of cooperation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27023391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27023391 Am I misunderstanding you or nullc?
- nullc 6y agoIf the root public key is used nothing is revealed. The root pubkey could be an N of N of parties to the transaction (e.g. everyone cooperates), or any other condition you can express with pubkeys alone. So say that you have a coin that can be spent by 2 of 3 Alice, Bob, Charlie or it can be spent by Alice alone after one year has passed. The A/B/C 2of3 could be made the root, it would look like a single pubkey, and be indistinguishable from a ordinary single key wallet. The timeout+alice condition would only get revealed in the even that Bob or Charlie will cooperate and the timeout gets used.
- ufo 6y agoWhat is this Taproot about?
- anonporridge 6y agohttps://medium.com/interdax/what-is-taproot-and-how-will-it-benefit-bitcoin-5c8944eed8da https://medium.com/interdax/what-is-taproot-and-how-will-it-... One of the big improvements is that multi-signature transactions, where both Alice and Bob have to sign to spend some money, used to require adding N signatures (number of signers) to the block chain to have a valid transaction. So it improves efficiency and should allow squeezing more transactions, but it also improves privacy, because there's no way to tell if how many parties are involved in the transaction. Merkelised Abstract Syntax Tree (MAST) are the other big feature that allows for more complex scripting to also be represented in a compressed and obfuscated way (example in the link).
- tribler 6y agoTaproot with MAST enables a DAO on Bitcoin. See the full implementation here by Delft University of Technology scientists and students. [1] Security needs work, functionality works. (disclaimer, I'm the responsibile professor) [1] https://github.com/Tribler/trustchain-superapp#luxury-communism https://github.com/Tribler/trustchain-superapp#luxury-commun...
- ur-whale 6y ago> What is this Taproot about? If accepted by the miners, Bitcoin will a bunch of low-level upgrades: - more compact signatures (decrease blockchain size) - paves the way to smart contract - improve transaction privacy https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/taproot-coming-what-it-and-how-it-will-benefit-bitcoin https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/taproot-coming-what-it...
- nullc 6y agoIn Bitcoin every coin has a list of programmatic conditions attached to it that set the rules for spending the code. Usually the rule is just "provide a digital signature with key X", or some threshold of keys. Though they can be more much complicated, and even simple scripts can have powerful applications (e.g. https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-contingent-payments-announcement/ https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting... ) The flexibility is nice but there are some gotchas-- Your rules are included in the transaction, storing and transmitting expends system resources, costs you fees, distinguishes your transactions from other users, and in doing so discloses information about your business practices. Taproot addresses this by doing some relatively simple elliptic curve crypto magic to effectively hide the conditions inside a public key without impairing it or making it larger. Then, if the parties transacting cooperate they can keep their fancy conditions private and just sign using a single jointly controlled key. If the parties don't cooperate some of the conditions may need to be exposed, but only the absolute minimum to show the transaction is allowable. Cooperation is likely however, because non-cooperating won't create a benefit. The effect is that instead of being limited to a few thousand bytes of operations for the rules governing your coin, you could have gigabytes of rules, and yet never expose them (and burn network resources and your privacy) -- or if you do need to to expose some of them, you only need to show a small amount. ... and as a bonus have your transactions look just like a really boring maximally simple wallet's transactions. There are also some small efficiency gains: somewhat smaller signatures and making batch signature validation possible. It's a little difficult to estimate the impact this improvement will have: Most users only use relatively simple rules, and as a result they will just become a little more private and a little more efficient. But if taproot was marketed like most altcoins are the headline would be "Taproot increases script expressiveness FORTY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE while reducing resource usage!", because-- indeed-- you could make a script that was 1.3e41 times larger than the current rules allow if only you had a computer powerful enough to handle such data locally. :P So for common uses it's a small to moderate efficiency and privacy improvement, but it could enable some new and interesting applications. ... and you might not ever know about some application that benefited from it, because unless you're a party to its transactions there may be nothing identifying published about them. :) Not the best for marketing, but better for human rights.
- ur-whale 6y agoTaproot, aside from the upgrade itself, is very interesting because it will be a test of Bitcoin's upgrade-ability. Last effort to improve Bitcoin (Segwit) was basically a giant shitshow. Let's hope the ecosystem has matured and this one will be a little more orderly.
- BelenusMordred 6y agoTaproot is far less controversial.
- ftlio 6y agoWhat was controversial about segwit outside of a large commercial interest (Bitmain) losing the ability to leverage a patented algorithm that effectively increased their ASIC productivity? I always thought that was what drove most of the drama and Bitcoin Cash, a place where they could continue to arbitrage that mining boost, to come about.
- nullc 6y agoWell a lot of people were bamboozled by manufactured misinformation there. There has been a lot less of it here-- presumably because there is a lot less incentive to create and propagate it-- and fewer people have been falling for what misinformation exists.
- ftlio 6y agoBack then it was so clearly orchestrated propaganda, but it took a lot of newcomers. I'm not looking forward to this cycle's "blocksize" debate. It seems that rolling new coins is the better vector overall for such schemes, for better or worse. Thank you for continuing the discourse all these years and keeping people informed.
- BelenusMordred 6y agoWasn't my opinion on it, just a casual observation on the difference between the two BIPs. The monetary incentive for Bitmain was without dispute last time. Such a thing doesn't exist this time. Taproot will pass without any drama.
- crazypython 6y agoA Bitcoin full node only takes 5GB of disk space to run, and 256MB of memory. [0]: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/Bitcoin.org/pull/3624/files https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/Bitcoin.org/pull/3624/fil... [1]: https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node
- rawtxapp 6y agoIn hindsight, I think most would agree it was a good idea to force the smarter scaling solutions rather than brute-force blocksize scaling (which sooner or later would have hit a ceiling anyways).
- wmf 6y agoThe "smarter" scaling solutions still aren't here after years of waiting, fees are hitting all-time highs, and other chains can do >4,000 TPS on layer 1. So no, small blocks weren't and aren't a good idea.
- rawtxapp 6y agoThey are here, the publicly known nodes alone on lightning have 1.2+k BTC locked in [1], that's ignoring all the private channels which form the majority of the channels (private channels are the end-user channels which don't route transactions themselves and are not broadcast publicly). We have easy to use wallets [2], easy ways to run lightning nodes [3]. And if you look at the average transaction value, you can see that the blockchain itself is acting more of a settlement layer rather than "coffee transactions" as it should [4]. 1: https://1ml.com/ https://1ml.com/ 2: https://phoenix.acinq.co/ https://phoenix.acinq.co/ 3: https://getumbrel.com/ https://getumbrel.com/ 4: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionvalue-btc-xrp.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionvalue-btc-xr...
- wmf 6y agothe blockchain itself is acting more of a settlement layer That is a sign of failure.
- crazypython 6y agoHow does Bitcoin "enforce new rules" without creating a hard fork?
- sp332 6y agoIt is a soft fork. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/bip-8-bip-9-or-modern-soft-fork-activation-how-bitcoin-could-upgrade-next https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/bip-8-bip-9-or-modern-... "The nice thing about adding or tightening rules is that anything that an upgraded node considers valid, a non-upgraded node considers valid, too." The signalling mechanism is a way for the miners to vote ahead of time whether they will follow to the new fork or not. If more than 10% of the hash power of the network does not signal that it will follow, then the fork is called off and won't happen.
- nullc 6y agoThe same was a sculptor extracts a bust from a block of raw marble -- subtractive geometry. Bitcoin's rules specify what isn't allowed and violating that breaks compatibility, but the system can become more restrictive without becoming incompatible. Huge chunks of the space of possible inputs was set aside for futures use by allowing them in blocks without imposing any structure (while disallowing them for loose transactions so nodes won't inadvertently relay transactions which are invalid due to rules they don't understand). In that sense all future features are already complete latent inside the system and to make them useful the community need only chip away at all the permitted inputs which aren't compatible with the desired new functionality. :)
- rocqua 6y agoThe idea is that, under the old version, the transactions enforcing new rules look like "anyone can spend this transaction". Hence, old clients still accept these transactions, they just don't verify them. The new nodes do verify those transactions, which prevents unauthorized transactions from reaching the blockchain, as long as there are enough new nodes.
- sp332 6y agoI think the confusion is that the old nodes might create new chains that the new nodes will not follow. But with >90% of the hash power of the network on one side, the old-style blocks will be orphaned pretty quickly. And all clients will follow the longest chain they consider legitimate, so old-style blocks will just be ignored after they are orphaned.
- TekMol 6y agoEvery time a chain hardforks like this, they basically create a new currency and everyone starts calling the new currency "Bitcoin", "Ethereum" etc. While in theory it is not. What would happen if a Bitcoin fund like Grayscale would say that their customers are only entitled to the "original" Bitcoins in the fund. So investors would be left with pretty much worthless stuff? What would happen if they don't, but the original coins keep being traded at say 10% of the value of the new ones. Who pockets those 10%?
- WanderPanda 6y agoI don’t get why this is downvoted. It is technically true and raises an interesting legal issue. Edit: Isn’t this also what happened on some exchanges with the previous big forks?
- TekMol 6y agoI think this is a systematic issue with Hacker News, Reddit etc. While low quality comments are easy to spot, low quality votes are not. I often think HN should have the requirement to explain a downvote. I would think that downvotes like these have low quality explanations like "Shut up, idiot!". So these low quality votes could be dealt with and the voters future votes could be discounted.
- nullc 6y agoYou're being downvoted here because this isn't a compatibility breaking change. No hardfork. So the questions you raise aren't likely to be implicated here.
- TekMol 6y agoI don't think that is true. I don't think miners and nodes can keep running the old software and not run into problems. Look through this thread to see my reasoning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27021878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27021878
- Animats 6y agoThey're telling you to use the unsigned executable because they screwed up renewing their signing certificate. Bad excuse. Very bad security practice for a Bitcoin wallet. They do offer SHA-256 hashes for the executables, so people can check by hand, but the download and the hashed check come from the same site. If someone can spoof the download site, they can Make Money Fast. Somewhere, someone is probably working out a way to exploit this right now.
- pstrateman 6y agoThe SHA-256 hashes are gpg signed with the key at https://bitcoin.org/laanwj-releases.asc https://bitcoin.org/laanwj-releases.asc Nobody actually checks the executable signatures, they're buried in the file properties.
- garmaine 6y agoEveryone on macOS and Windows checks the executable signatures automatically on first run.
- ddtaylor 6y agoCan't an attacker modify the executable to not do that?
- freeone3000 6y agoNo, because the check isn't part of the executable, it's part of the operating system. An attacker would have to modify the executable to have a valid certificate, which would take several months and a few hundred dollars, which usually makes it not worth it.
- tinus_hn 6y agoThe alternative is signing it with another certificate which is about $100
- encryptluks2 6y agoDoesn't Algorand and Ethereum solve these issues already? The transaction fees on Bitcoin essentially just make it a savings account. Does Bitcoin actually have potential for smart contracts?
- user-the-name 6y agoBitcoin currently consumes over 0.1% of the entire energy of the planet. Bitcoin currently emits as much carbon as the entire country of Sweden. Bitcoin currently creates 10000 tons of electronic waste and associated pollution a year. Bitcoin is currently enabling a massive epidemic of ransomware, which is not only crippling businesses but also critically important societal services. At this point, it is neither ethical nor moral to use bitcoin, or do anything that helps it thrive. Bitcoin is a crime against humanity, and must be destroyed as soon as possible.
- gaara87 6y agoWhat societal services are being crippled by ransomware that's so called enabled by Bitcoin? Please understand there's a difference between what the technology provides and what it's being used for. Malicious people using the technology is true of many many technologies. I keep getting phishing calls every other day to give my SSN, does that mean the social security program should be canceled for this very reason?
- dane-pgp 6y ago> I keep getting phishing calls every other day to give my SSN, does that mean the social security program should be canceled for this very reason? No, but according to some people's logic it's a reason to ban telephone calls.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoA person could reasonably argue that it's a good reason to ban untraceable phone calls, which is actually being worked on. Likewise, a person could reasonably argue that truly anonymous money shouldn't exist. I'm not actually convinced of this, but it's a coherent position to hold.
- user-the-name 6y ago> What societal services are being crippled by ransomware that's so called enabled by Bitcoin? https://threatpost.com/ransomware-hits-hospitals-hardest/162096/ https://threatpost.com/ransomware-hits-hospitals-hardest/162... > Please understand there's a difference between what the technology provides and what it's being used for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- leishman 6y agoFor those who don’t know what Taproot is: https://river.com/learn/what-is-taproot/ https://river.com/learn/what-is-taproot/
- tinus_hn 6y agoI guess the information was there somewhere but I still don’t understand what it is. This is not clear enough.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 6y ago:)
- lucasnortj 6y agomore clowns wasting their time on a pointless tech that goes against the interests of civilisation
- crypot 6y agoWow, the future is here. In just 12 short years we made it to version 0.21. At this point bitcoin is like an economic black hole. Most technology allows us to do more with less. So far, bitcoin doesn't follow that pattern. The higher the price, the more resources are needed to secure the network.