10 ms·

On anyone-can-spend Pay-to-Taproot outputs before activation

32 points by b10c 5y ago

vmception 5y ago
That’s really fascinating, Ive always found it interesting how some arts become lost in cryptocurrency. Like if you ever read a book on the topic you become aware of so many manual things you can do that wallets don't surface to you.
- ASTP001 5y ago
  Like what? Curious to hear about some interesting manual interactions you can do with the network that isn't exposed in typical wallets.
  - vmception 5y ago
    This Pay-to-Taproot output spendable by anyone is a decent example. Most multisignature behaviors still aren't exposed, its kind of weird. But looking for to taproot making multisignature addresses indistinguishable from other addresses. There's the general empty space that people shove all sorts of things into. From plain text metadata to encoded messages to derivatives trades.
    - hanniabu 5y ago
      From my experience that see it as a technical superiority thing. Where if you want to use that functionality you'd be smart enough to know how to use the cli and if you can't then you probably shouldn't be using it. And then are typically met with hostile attitudes saying that if you're that much of a noob and need a GUI then just go use a lite client or something. The white bitcoin core community is very ostracizing and unwelcoming. Even vitalik has mentioned that this attitude was one of the things that turned him away from bitcoin (along with refusal to evolve features) and launch ethereum.
      - vmception 5y ago
        I’m glad that’s mostly gone from the crypto space, but its because the core maintainers of projects from the first half of the decade either disappear, leave publicly denouncing that attitude, or die. In the mean time, a lot of people still tinker at their own volition, read technical books, or now learn about blockchain structures in universities, leading to a continual new set of people using blockchains differently or at their fundamental level.
      - murrayn 5y ago
        > The white bitcoin core community The what now?
        hanniabu 5y ago
        Whole*, autocorrect typo
willwashburn 5y ago
Is there any hard fork scheduled in the near future for Bitcoin, with more important upgrades?
- tylersmith 5y ago
  No. There's an old wishlist of items but there is not plan to ever implement them or any other hard forking behaviors.
  - hanniabu 5y ago
    Good luck with quantum proof encryption
- stickac 5y ago
  The real artistry is to deploy updates without doing a hard fork. Taproot is one of these and it is very, very important.
  - px43 5y ago
    It's not artistry, it's overly complex hackery to satiate some weird technological obsession. Even with a soft fork, everyone still needs to update their nodes to maintain consensus. BIP100 signalling would have fixed everything and avoided so much drama.
    - gruez 5y ago
      > It's not artistry, it's overly complex hackery to satiate some weird technological obsession. Also known as... backwards compatibility. >Even with a soft fork, everyone still needs to update their nodes to maintain consensus Not really. If you decide to not upgrade your node you're not going to get kicked off the network. Your node won't be enforcing the new rules (which is bad), but you're probably not going to lose money due to herd immunity and/or game theory. Specifically, your client will blindly accept taproot transactions (without checking for them) if they make it into a block. An evil miner could possibly use this to send you fraudulent transfers, however: 1. you need to somehow amass the hashpower necessary to generate such a block. this is non-trivial given the network difficulty 2. the block would be considered invalid by the rest of the network, so you'll be forfeiting the regular block reward of ~6.25 BTC 3. other miners won't build on top of this block, so it will take forever to get to 6 confirms 4. in addition to the above, your fork will get overtaken by the legitimate chain and will be ignored 5. if it turns out that your victim did upgrade his wallet software, you just spent a bunch of resources for nothing.
chejazi 5y ago
Ah, a soft fork focused on SegWit transactions. Every time I try and follow along with the latest in Bitcoin I just don't get that excited. I think that's part of the point, though. "Hard money" and all.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Hard money doesn't exhibit 15000% annualized inflation in a one-month period. That Weimar Republic behavior. Don't get me wrong, I'm not mad about that - it's made me tons of money on the short side. I'm just saying, it's bad money.
  - vmception 5y ago
    I'm looking forward to third party assets being tradable on the Bitcoin network again. My contribution to the gradient of behaviors on that network was one where the Bitcoin asset was only used to cover transaction fees for the actual money being traded. The whole "merchant adoption" thing was always a squirrel to me. When merchants will accept stable value assets more readily, or use those stable value assets for settlement, just like the US regulator greenlighted a few months ago.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      Genuine curiosity: why would you trade third-party assets on the Bitcoin network when you could do it infinitely more efficiently on any of the competing chains? It's by far the least efficient blockchain ergo the least efficient way to trade third-party assets. [edit] Direct fees are lower than they used to be, and the energy cost is about now up to about $100-120 per transaction. While that's being socialized across block reward for now, when that ends, it will have to be born directly by customers or see the network become less secure.
      - thebean11 5y ago
        > While that's being socialized across block reward for now, when that ends, it will have to be born directly by customers That's true, total transaction revenue will need to go up. That doesn't mean per-transaction revenue needs to go up though. Put another way, transaction volume needs to scale before inflation gets too low.
vecio 5y ago
The miner can include some non-standard transactions makes Bitcoin not so perfect, and once that non-standard transactions included in a block, other miners won't validate its script at all, that make it worse.
- gruez 5y ago
  >other miners won't validate its script at all, that make it worse. What do you mean by "validate" here? All nodes check for validity, in the sense that the transaction is properly authorized.
- wmf 5y ago
  once that non-standard transactions included in a block, other miners won't validate its script at all I don't think this is correct. Miners (are supposed to) validate all transactions in all blocks.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  Nodes don't relay non standard transactions to be mined, but blocks with non standard transactions are relayed and accepted by all nodes. These rules together make soft forks possible.
- nullc 5y ago
  I can't quite follow what you're thinking. The bitcoin transaction format has numerous points of intentional forward compatibility: Fields, flags, bits, etc. which intentionally have no effect at this time but which could be further restricted in the future in order to create functionality. Examples include future transaction version numbers and future script version numbers. Use of these forward compatibility features is "non-standard" which means that unmodified software will not relay, mine, or display-while-unconfirmed transactions which use them. But if they happen to show up inside blocks, they'll be accepted. This protects these fields for future use. Otherwise, some software would start randomly setting them (e.g. due to programming mistakes or confusion) and then these systems would catch fire when later the fields were given a defined meaning. This article is about output with version 1 instead of version 0. Currently v1 is defined to have no effect. At block 709632 (in November roughly) that will change and v1 will have a meaning defined by BIP-341 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0341.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0341.mediawi...).
nikolay 5y ago
Yeah, spend it before it drops down to $0 when all governments recognize the threat of this Ponzi to the consumers and to the environment! Bitcoin will never be green - only green in the color of the US dollar as everybody holding BTC cares how much his fake money is worth in greenbacks!

32 points by b10c 5y ago

That’s really fascinating, Ive always found it interesting how some arts become lost in cryptocurrency. Like if you ever read a book on the topic you become aware of so many manual things you can do that wallets don't surface to you.

ASTP001 5y ago
Like what? Curious to hear about some interesting manual interactions you can do with the network that isn't exposed in typical wallets.
- vmception 5y ago
  This Pay-to-Taproot output spendable by anyone is a decent example. Most multisignature behaviors still aren't exposed, its kind of weird. But looking for to taproot making multisignature addresses indistinguishable from other addresses. There's the general empty space that people shove all sorts of things into. From plain text metadata to encoded messages to derivatives trades.
  - hanniabu 5y ago
    From my experience that see it as a technical superiority thing. Where if you want to use that functionality you'd be smart enough to know how to use the cli and if you can't then you probably shouldn't be using it. And then are typically met with hostile attitudes saying that if you're that much of a noob and need a GUI then just go use a lite client or something. The white bitcoin core community is very ostracizing and unwelcoming. Even vitalik has mentioned that this attitude was one of the things that turned him away from bitcoin (along with refusal to evolve features) and launch ethereum.
    - vmception 5y ago
      I’m glad that’s mostly gone from the crypto space, but its because the core maintainers of projects from the first half of the decade either disappear, leave publicly denouncing that attitude, or die. In the mean time, a lot of people still tinker at their own volition, read technical books, or now learn about blockchain structures in universities, leading to a continual new set of people using blockchains differently or at their fundamental level.
    - murrayn 5y ago
      > The white bitcoin core community The what now?
      - hanniabu 5y ago
        Whole*, autocorrect typo

willwashburn 5y ago

Is there any hard fork scheduled in the near future for Bitcoin, with more important upgrades?

tylersmith 5y ago
No. There's an old wishlist of items but there is not plan to ever implement them or any other hard forking behaviors.
- hanniabu 5y ago
  Good luck with quantum proof encryption
stickac 5y ago
The real artistry is to deploy updates without doing a hard fork. Taproot is one of these and it is very, very important.
- px43 5y ago
  It's not artistry, it's overly complex hackery to satiate some weird technological obsession. Even with a soft fork, everyone still needs to update their nodes to maintain consensus. BIP100 signalling would have fixed everything and avoided so much drama.
  - gruez 5y ago
    > It's not artistry, it's overly complex hackery to satiate some weird technological obsession. Also known as... backwards compatibility. >Even with a soft fork, everyone still needs to update their nodes to maintain consensus Not really. If you decide to not upgrade your node you're not going to get kicked off the network. Your node won't be enforcing the new rules (which is bad), but you're probably not going to lose money due to herd immunity and/or game theory. Specifically, your client will blindly accept taproot transactions (without checking for them) if they make it into a block. An evil miner could possibly use this to send you fraudulent transfers, however: 1. you need to somehow amass the hashpower necessary to generate such a block. this is non-trivial given the network difficulty 2. the block would be considered invalid by the rest of the network, so you'll be forfeiting the regular block reward of ~6.25 BTC 3. other miners won't build on top of this block, so it will take forever to get to 6 confirms 4. in addition to the above, your fork will get overtaken by the legitimate chain and will be ignored 5. if it turns out that your victim did upgrade his wallet software, you just spent a bunch of resources for nothing.

chejazi 5y ago

Ah, a soft fork focused on SegWit transactions. Every time I try and follow along with the latest in Bitcoin I just don't get that excited. I think that's part of the point, though. "Hard money" and all.

arcticbull 5y ago
Hard money doesn't exhibit 15000% annualized inflation in a one-month period. That Weimar Republic behavior. Don't get me wrong, I'm not mad about that - it's made me tons of money on the short side. I'm just saying, it's bad money.
- vmception 5y ago
  I'm looking forward to third party assets being tradable on the Bitcoin network again. My contribution to the gradient of behaviors on that network was one where the Bitcoin asset was only used to cover transaction fees for the actual money being traded. The whole "merchant adoption" thing was always a squirrel to me. When merchants will accept stable value assets more readily, or use those stable value assets for settlement, just like the US regulator greenlighted a few months ago.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Genuine curiosity: why would you trade third-party assets on the Bitcoin network when you could do it infinitely more efficiently on any of the competing chains? It's by far the least efficient blockchain ergo the least efficient way to trade third-party assets. [edit] Direct fees are lower than they used to be, and the energy cost is about now up to about $100-120 per transaction. While that's being socialized across block reward for now, when that ends, it will have to be born directly by customers or see the network become less secure.
    - thebean11 5y ago
      > While that's being socialized across block reward for now, when that ends, it will have to be born directly by customers That's true, total transaction revenue will need to go up. That doesn't mean per-transaction revenue needs to go up though. Put another way, transaction volume needs to scale before inflation gets too low.

vecio 5y ago

The miner can include some non-standard transactions makes Bitcoin not so perfect, and once that non-standard transactions included in a block, other miners won't validate its script at all, that make it worse.

gruez 5y ago
>other miners won't validate its script at all, that make it worse. What do you mean by "validate" here? All nodes check for validity, in the sense that the transaction is properly authorized.
wmf 5y ago
once that non-standard transactions included in a block, other miners won't validate its script at all I don't think this is correct. Miners (are supposed to) validate all transactions in all blocks.
xiphias2 5y ago
Nodes don't relay non standard transactions to be mined, but blocks with non standard transactions are relayed and accepted by all nodes. These rules together make soft forks possible.
nullc 5y ago
I can't quite follow what you're thinking. The bitcoin transaction format has numerous points of intentional forward compatibility: Fields, flags, bits, etc. which intentionally have no effect at this time but which could be further restricted in the future in order to create functionality. Examples include future transaction version numbers and future script version numbers. Use of these forward compatibility features is "non-standard" which means that unmodified software will not relay, mine, or display-while-unconfirmed transactions which use them. But if they happen to show up inside blocks, they'll be accepted. This protects these fields for future use. Otherwise, some software would start randomly setting them (e.g. due to programming mistakes or confusion) and then these systems would catch fire when later the fields were given a defined meaning. This article is about output with version 1 instead of version 0. Currently v1 is defined to have no effect. At block 709632 (in November roughly) that will change and v1 will have a meaning defined by BIP-341 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0341.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0341.mediawi...).

nikolay 5y ago

Yeah, spend it before it drops down to $0 when all governments recognize the threat of this Ponzi to the consumers and to the environment! Bitcoin will never be green - only green in the color of the US dollar as everybody holding BTC cares how much his fake money is worth in greenbacks!