39 ms·

Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated upgrade, has activated

225 points by G3rn0ti 5y ago

nanna 5y ago
When will BTC move to an energy efficient protocol?
- lugorrr 5y ago
  When will everyone only do energy efficient things. Stop the global party. https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-carbon-footprint/ https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-carbon-footprint/
  - robbie-c 5y ago
    I skimmed this but it seems pretty heavy motivated reasoning. > However, despite being extremely energy intensive, per unit power consumed, Bitcoin mining is probably one of the most environmentally friendly activities in the world. This is due to the unique flexibility with respect to where the power is required. This means miners often choose renewable power due to the low stable costs or miners are able to use otherwise wasted or stranded energy. This is a fact often claimed by Bitcoin proponents and it is probably true. Per unit power consumed Bitcoin is likely to be exceptionally environmentally friendly. Ok, but what's actually happening? We can pontificate about how bitcoin mining could be hypothetically switched over to entirely renewable power because it is geography and time independent, but what's the cold hard reality? What % of energy used in bitcoin mining is from coal or other fossil fuels? What's the delta amount of fossil fuels burned compared to bitcoin not existing? How does that compare to other ways of sending money digitally? Any defence of bitcoin on environmental grounds that dodges that question is flaky at best.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - vageli 5y ago
      > What % of energy used in bitcoin mining is from coal or other fossil fuels? > What's the delta amount of fossil fuels burned compared to bitcoin not existing? How does that compare to other ways of sending money digitally? How would it be possible to answer any of those questions reliably when any individual could set up a miner at their home?
      - robbie-c 5y ago
        I'm only talking analytics-quality data here, at the very least you would look at the major players and see where they are based. You would at least want to include anyone capable of doing setting up their own power plant specifically for mining, like these guys https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-58020010 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-58020010
- capableweb 5y ago
  Wouldn't the right question be "Will BTC move to an energy efficient protocol?". As far as I know, there is no plans from the Bitcoin developers to move away from Proof of Work, but I'd be happy to be corrected.
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    I believe the simple answer is "when BTC stakeholders stand to lose money by not moving away from PoW".
    - jstx1 5y ago
      I think there's too much ideology, politics and tribalism involved to simplify it like this.
    - javert 5y ago
      You can't move bitcoin off proof of work. You can fork it, and the fork can become more dominant, but the fork won't be bitcoin. Similarly for changing the 21M coin limit. Bitcoin is an idea, not a democracy.
- thegreatpeter 5y ago
  When will we stop asking this on HN?
- TekMol 5y ago
  The mining reward is similar to a military budget. The higher the amount, the harder it is for someone to mess with peoples freedom to spend their money. Currently it is about $10B per year. The military budget of the USA alone is over $700B per year. It is a tricky issue. How can we create security from malicious actors without spending much on defense? How much does the world spend on locks? Probably a lot. It seems we have not found a cheaper way yet. Maybe proof of stake will be as reliable and cheaper. We will see in a few years.
- Mistletoe 5y ago
  It will never. Best option is just invest in Ethereum which has Proof of Stake (not energy-intensive) coming next year. The changeover to it being the top coin is inevitable. It only needs to double its market cap right now to do so, which isn’t that difficult in something as wild as crypto. And I say that without bias and I’m about 80/20 BTC/ETH right now. I think the coming months may be the last hurrah for BTC. There’s no need to use that much energy and it will only get more important with time. I have lost an incredible amount of money backing the wrong horse the past year or two and being in Bitcoin as Ethereum has eaten its lunch. BTC maximalists will file in below me with bogus attestations that proof of stake is bad and none of it will be correct or factual. Proof of stake actually increases decentralization and eliminates the fact that now to mine btc you need to be near a very cheap electricity source and have ties that can get you the fastest asic mining machines as soon as they come out. Source: Myself, a former crypto miner.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    It's not jsut maximalists, every day people will tell you that the richest people invariably create cartels and it ends up badly. This time is not different
  - Gosper 5y ago
    Ethereum's current approach to PoS is insecure. It will take a lot more work to get to a secure enough place to switch over, if a switch is even possible at all. I pointed to the latest vulnerabilities in another reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229084
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  To me, the fact that bitcoin is so inefficient means that a government cannot coopt it because it would be politically untenable. That's trading a bad thing for a good thing Ultimately though, side chains with various insured instruments (aka banks) will prevail due to their ease-of-use, and most real-world transactions will use unstable side coins (aka fiat currency).
Glench 5y ago
A snarky tweet from Bram Cohen of Chia (which has had taproot and graftroot enabled since launch in March): > Congratulations to Bitcoin for joining the club of UTXO-based cryptocurrencies which have taproot enabled. https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/1459755439294275584 https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/1459755439294275584
- traceddd 5y ago
  Seems petty. Of course it’s easier to make changes when you just launched and there are less parties and more centralization at a leadership level. 8 months doesn’t really seem like something worthy to brag over.
  - Glench 5y ago
    Well, Bitcoin still doesn't have graftroot so it's 8 months and counting :) And Lord help me I'm talking about crypto on hacker news but Chia seems just better engineered overall: - uses between 300x and 10000x less energy for the same security as Bitcoin - has the most number of farmers/validators of any blockchain - supports around ~25 transactions per second (as opposed to bitcoin's 5) - very efficient and auditable on-chain language (much better than Solidity afaict) The Chia team did a good job taking everything that works well from Bitcoin while also learning from its shortcomings and improving. Chia is now the table stakes for what other blockchains have to compete with.
    - zaptrem 5y ago
      > ~25 TPS Still a couple orders of magnitude away from being a significant difference.
    - gruez 5y ago
      > - uses between 300x and 10000x less energy for the same security as Bitcoin right, but instead of mostly electricity being poured into mining, now it's hard drive components. It's still the same amount of dollars (resources) poured into mining. The only difference is shifting it from opex to capex. >- has the most number of farmers/validators of any blockchain valid point, although I wouldn't really chalk it up to it being "better engineered". bitcoin supports validation at the miner level (ie. you can do the validation, rather than trusting/relying on the pool) as well via getblocktemplate. It's just not widely adopted for whatever reason.
TekMol 5y ago
A crazy thing with Taproot is: A company could create a virtual bank to handle all transfers with its suppliers by doing a single onchain transaction. From the outside, it would look like a normal "Someone sent some coins from address A to address B" transaction. But internally, a key needed to spend the funds is only valid if the company and all of its suppliers sign it. This means every time there is a transaction between the company and one of its suppliers, the company would send out a signed message with the new spending conditions (the new balance of the company and every supplier) to the supplier network. Everyone signs it and that's it. It does not go on chain. Only if a participant becomes uncooperative, the latest state will go on chain and everyone will get what they own. So in the future, two transactions on the Bitcoin chain a few years apart could be "Someone sent something somewhere in December 2021 and then they send something somewhere in June 2025". Or it could be "BMW did ten thousand transactions with its suppliers". You don't know. Both look the same on chain. And all of the transactions were free, instant and possible 24/7.
- teekert 5y ago
  "And all of the transaction were free", Wait? Since when are transactions free and instant? Is that part of this upgrade? The only costs are with the "bank transaction"?
  - TekMol 5y ago
    A second layer transaction does not involve the Bitcoin network. When Katy wants to pay ₿3 to Billie, Katy just sends a key (via email or some API) to Billie which enables Billie to withdraw ₿3 from the account of Katy. But Billie does not do that. Billie just keeps that message like you keep your login to your bank account. When Katy wants to pay another ₿5 to Billie, Katy sends a key to Billie which enables Billie to withdraw ₿8 from the account of Katy. Now Katy paid Billie ₿8 in two transactions. All via email, letter, telephone or - most likely - API. Nothing at all happened on the Bitcoin network.
    - piaste 5y ago
      However, if nothing happens on the Bitcoin network, then the funds aren't locked down, are they? In other words, Billie has no guarantee that the key she holds will be valid tomorrow; Katy could empty that account at any time, and Billie would then hold nothing except the evidence of Katy's wrongdoing.
rawtxapp 5y ago
One of the most interesting things in this experiment was the speedy trial imo. We now have an agreed way to change/improve consensus rules. It's very difficult to get a handful of people to agree on something, let alone all the different participants in this global/borderless system.
- 323 5y ago
  That's because bitcoin is so centralized these days, that you can get all the people that matter in a room and hash things out. Note how half of the Bitcoin network nodes don't support taproot yet, but it's irrelevant. The few nodes that matter do support it.
  - rawtxapp 5y ago
    > That's because bitcoin is so centralized these days Citation badly needed. For taproot to rollout, you need wallet providers, exchanges, nodes and miners to agree. There are hundreds/thousands of different participants in each one of these categories across the world. Specifically, 90% of nodes need to signal for it.
    - 323 5y ago
      It says right in the article that wallets don't support taproot either at the moment. > Specifically, 90% of nodes need to signal for it. Wrong, 90% of mined blocks need to signal it, not 90% of nodes. Big difference: > at least 90% of the blocks mined in any of the designated two-week difficulty periods "signal" their support for the upgrade, then the activation process can begin. To be more precise: 1,815 out of 2,016 blocks mined within a period have to include a little piece of encoded information that indicates that the miners who mined those blocks are in favor of the upgrade. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/06/12/locked-in-bitcoins-taproot-upgrade-gets-its-90-mandate/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/06/12/locked-in-bitcoins-...
      - Jach 5y ago
        There are a number of ways to achieve consensus, rawtxapp is right in general that many decentralized parties need to agree. For Taproot in particular, it uses BIP 8 (see https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0008.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0008.mediawi... and https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0343.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0343.mediawi... and more generally 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-...) with LockinOnTimeout=true. The effect of this is that miners cannot block the upgrade so long as the (eventual) majority of nodes wishes to have the upgrade, they can only hurry things along and mostly protect the minority of older clients who have yet to upgrade.
lightweb 5y ago
Ignore at your own potential peril.. BTCers don't care, apparently https://coingeek.com/could-taproot-privacy-features-make-btc-illegal/ https://coingeek.com/could-taproot-privacy-features-make-btc...
- G3rn0ti 5y ago
  All Layer 2 scaling solutions would also be obfuscating transactions because all out of chain transactions are invisible on chain.
- vmception 5y ago
  Exchanges that delisted privacy coins were not doing so because they were viewed as illegal. Those businesses just didn't have the risk profile to ever take anything to court to solidify the obvious reality that they're not illegal. Their relationship with the regulators is too important for them. Fortunately, CeFi exchanges are less of the volume these days than DeFi and institutional OTC. When I was using institutional OTC in the United States, they would make markets for me in Monero if I asked. If I said "I want to trade this random erc20 altcoin for Monero" they'd say "say less, we got you", and quote me a very competitive price. Same for moving dollars in and out. But I've been using DeFi AMMs all year. The DeFi bridges for bitcoin are fine as well. There are only 1 or 2 permissionless ones for Bitcoin itself, for now, but they're okay. Moving a few billion in volume already this year. The permissioned ones operate under the same risk profile and regulatory profile as exchanges do, so its not a deal breaker if you already use CeFi, and the user experience on any bridge can still be better - depending on what you want to do. Even Monero has a permissionless bridge too now, on the Secret Network. so you don't even need any exchanges or those sketchy centralized swapping services to move in and out of Monero anymore, and from Secret Network you can bridge to the broader DeFi ecosystem. This should get even better.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  There's game theory at play here that transcends the legal system. Yes, the US and the EU could deem these cryptocurrencies to be illegal. However, as we saw in China, all that accomplishes is squeezing it out of your borders, or squeezing it to the black market. Making it illegal would also be an insanely strong signal to the entire world that this thing actually is uncontrollable by our current governments, and that they're scared of it. Knowing they can never actively kill it, just drive it elsewhere, these societies have to take a gamble. Either assume it's eventually going to wither and die after they ban it, thereby protecting their citizens from wasting time and money on the system, or assume it's going continue to grow into being the foundation of a new global monetary system that's going to automate and consume everything that's existed before, and severely miss out on being at the vanguard of that industry.
nanna 5y ago
Can anyone explain why my genuine question below -- "When will BTC move to an energy efficient protocol?" -- was flagged? Seems a bit gratuitous?
- sowbug 5y ago
  I didn't flag, but if that's what you wrote, it's off-topic. It's also tedious. We get it. It uses energy by design. You can count on any HN Bitcoin discussion to bring out the environmentalist in almost anyone.
  - The_Colonel 5y ago
    It's not that much off-topic given that this discussion is about Bitcoin protocol upgrade and switch to PoS is a potential protocol upgrade as well.
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    It's not off-topic at all. But I can see how it's tedious.
- Gosper 5y ago
  I don't know why you were flagged, but if your question was in earnest: Bitcoin almost certainly won't move. Because those touted energy efficient protocols come at the cost of much weaker security guarantees which undermine a key point of Bitcoin. Proof of stake, the forerunner of energy efficient protocols, may work better for networks that have different aims, although smart contract oriented blockchains still need good security to be trusted. The stupendous levels of complexity involved in trying to hammer out proof of stake into a viable method of energy efficient mining make the approach look ever more unpromising. Ethereum keeps delaying the switch and the touted 2022 migration has once again been kicked into the long grass after this paper from a few weeks ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10086 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10086 Lead to: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42764 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42764 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42765 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42765 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42766 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42766
egypturnash 5y ago
Does Taproot do anything to reduce the absurd power consumption? If not then it just feels as useful as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic to me.
- loceng 5y ago
  Shhh.. Just keep looking at only the positives and the future, no time for criticism and addressing the known pitfalls!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- drak0n1c 5y ago
  Yes it does, the byte size of transaction processing is smaller, and additionally many more transactions can be batched together when processing happens due to the more efficient algorithm.
- Tepix 5y ago
  Bitcoins biggest innovation is moving transactions off of bitcoin. That tells you all about it's capabilities really. Why bother with this outdated tech when there are vastly more capable coins out there?
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    Because there are still more people to dupe into buying ASIC miners, as well as many more who haven't broken even yet. Can't you see what's at stake?!
    - Tepix 5y ago
      Oh i thought the main motivation was to get more people to buy the coin to raise its price.
      - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
saurik 5y ago
I am pretty sure that this upgrade was the piece needed to "more legitimately decentralize" the currency bridge between Bitcoin and rsk (rootstalk), which is the EVM-compatible smart contract layer that uses Bitcoin (bridged as rBTC) as its native gas currency (and which is being "merge mined" by a majority of the current Bitcoin hash rate and thereby isn't some weird insecure underutilized side chain).
- wslh 5y ago
  Typo: RSK was Rootstock: https://www.rsk.co/ https://www.rsk.co/ and has a governing organization: https://www.iovlabs.org/ https://www.iovlabs.org/
DantesKite 5y ago
I don't think the energy criticisms are that warranted. In my mind, it speaks more to a criticism of how poor our current energy infrastructure is. I don't think for example in 30 years it'll be a big problem when energy becomes more abundant and building nuclear reactors are easier. And this is coming from someone who believes Bitcoin is little more than a Ponzi scheme and most of the innovation in fintech is happening outside the cryptocurrency space. Still, it's pretty cool that changes to Bitcoin can happen like this. Makes me think eventually they'll figure out a use case for it, besides buying lattes in El Salvador.
- concinds 5y ago
  It does seem strange, because while I'm not too familiar with the PoW pro/cons arguments (I heard PoW was more secure than any other method, for now, but haven't verified that independently), it rubs me the wrong way to classify certain uses of electricity as "illegitimate". Some people prefer taking the plane over the train, should they be vilified? Some people like "driving around" to chill, not because they have a true transportation need. The offices near me are all lit up throughout the night. I wouldn't be surprised if when aggregated on a world level, there was a relatively significant percentage of energy just plain wasted. When AR/VR come out, hoping to replace zero-carbon-emitting IRL social interactions with heavy GPU/server-using gadgets, will people condemn that? I don't like the idea of piecemeal "bean counter" approach to new technology that happens to use energy; if there's zero point to PoW, they have a point, but if there are any security or decentralization benefits at all, it just seems like a non-problem. Treat it as a systemic problem, transition energy-use objects to electricity-use objects (like EVs), build more nuclear reactors, generate more clean-electricity, and have it not be an issue.
  - dinobones 5y ago
    The "Bitcoin is destroying the world ecosystem and is awful" crowd is way too hysterical for me to take them seriously. They write about Bitcoin like it is a serious evil and injustice in the world. It honestly feels like they're just folks who regret not investing in Bitcoin.
- 5y ago

225 points by G3rn0ti 5y ago

nanna 5y ago

When will BTC move to an energy efficient protocol?

lugorrr 5y ago
When will everyone only do energy efficient things. Stop the global party. https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-carbon-footprint/ https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-carbon-footprint/
- robbie-c 5y ago
  I skimmed this but it seems pretty heavy motivated reasoning. > However, despite being extremely energy intensive, per unit power consumed, Bitcoin mining is probably one of the most environmentally friendly activities in the world. This is due to the unique flexibility with respect to where the power is required. This means miners often choose renewable power due to the low stable costs or miners are able to use otherwise wasted or stranded energy. This is a fact often claimed by Bitcoin proponents and it is probably true. Per unit power consumed Bitcoin is likely to be exceptionally environmentally friendly. Ok, but what's actually happening? We can pontificate about how bitcoin mining could be hypothetically switched over to entirely renewable power because it is geography and time independent, but what's the cold hard reality? What % of energy used in bitcoin mining is from coal or other fossil fuels? What's the delta amount of fossil fuels burned compared to bitcoin not existing? How does that compare to other ways of sending money digitally? Any defence of bitcoin on environmental grounds that dodges that question is flaky at best.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - vageli 5y ago
    > What % of energy used in bitcoin mining is from coal or other fossil fuels? > What's the delta amount of fossil fuels burned compared to bitcoin not existing? How does that compare to other ways of sending money digitally? How would it be possible to answer any of those questions reliably when any individual could set up a miner at their home?
    - robbie-c 5y ago
      I'm only talking analytics-quality data here, at the very least you would look at the major players and see where they are based. You would at least want to include anyone capable of doing setting up their own power plant specifically for mining, like these guys https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-58020010 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-58020010
capableweb 5y ago
Wouldn't the right question be "Will BTC move to an energy efficient protocol?". As far as I know, there is no plans from the Bitcoin developers to move away from Proof of Work, but I'd be happy to be corrected.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  I believe the simple answer is "when BTC stakeholders stand to lose money by not moving away from PoW".
  - jstx1 5y ago
    I think there's too much ideology, politics and tribalism involved to simplify it like this.
  - javert 5y ago
    You can't move bitcoin off proof of work. You can fork it, and the fork can become more dominant, but the fork won't be bitcoin. Similarly for changing the 21M coin limit. Bitcoin is an idea, not a democracy.
thegreatpeter 5y ago
When will we stop asking this on HN?
TekMol 5y ago
The mining reward is similar to a military budget. The higher the amount, the harder it is for someone to mess with peoples freedom to spend their money. Currently it is about $10B per year. The military budget of the USA alone is over $700B per year. It is a tricky issue. How can we create security from malicious actors without spending much on defense? How much does the world spend on locks? Probably a lot. It seems we have not found a cheaper way yet. Maybe proof of stake will be as reliable and cheaper. We will see in a few years.
Mistletoe 5y ago
It will never. Best option is just invest in Ethereum which has Proof of Stake (not energy-intensive) coming next year. The changeover to it being the top coin is inevitable. It only needs to double its market cap right now to do so, which isn’t that difficult in something as wild as crypto. And I say that without bias and I’m about 80/20 BTC/ETH right now. I think the coming months may be the last hurrah for BTC. There’s no need to use that much energy and it will only get more important with time. I have lost an incredible amount of money backing the wrong horse the past year or two and being in Bitcoin as Ethereum has eaten its lunch. BTC maximalists will file in below me with bogus attestations that proof of stake is bad and none of it will be correct or factual. Proof of stake actually increases decentralization and eliminates the fact that now to mine btc you need to be near a very cheap electricity source and have ties that can get you the fastest asic mining machines as soon as they come out. Source: Myself, a former crypto miner.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  It's not jsut maximalists, every day people will tell you that the richest people invariably create cartels and it ends up badly. This time is not different
- Gosper 5y ago
  Ethereum's current approach to PoS is insecure. It will take a lot more work to get to a secure enough place to switch over, if a switch is even possible at all. I pointed to the latest vulnerabilities in another reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229084
cblconfederate 5y ago
To me, the fact that bitcoin is so inefficient means that a government cannot coopt it because it would be politically untenable. That's trading a bad thing for a good thing Ultimately though, side chains with various insured instruments (aka banks) will prevail due to their ease-of-use, and most real-world transactions will use unstable side coins (aka fiat currency).

Glench 5y ago

A snarky tweet from Bram Cohen of Chia (which has had taproot and graftroot enabled since launch in March): > Congratulations to Bitcoin for joining the club of UTXO-based cryptocurrencies which have taproot enabled. https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/1459755439294275584 https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/1459755439294275584

traceddd 5y ago
Seems petty. Of course it’s easier to make changes when you just launched and there are less parties and more centralization at a leadership level. 8 months doesn’t really seem like something worthy to brag over.
- Glench 5y ago
  Well, Bitcoin still doesn't have graftroot so it's 8 months and counting :) And Lord help me I'm talking about crypto on hacker news but Chia seems just better engineered overall: - uses between 300x and 10000x less energy for the same security as Bitcoin - has the most number of farmers/validators of any blockchain - supports around ~25 transactions per second (as opposed to bitcoin's 5) - very efficient and auditable on-chain language (much better than Solidity afaict) The Chia team did a good job taking everything that works well from Bitcoin while also learning from its shortcomings and improving. Chia is now the table stakes for what other blockchains have to compete with.
  - zaptrem 5y ago
    > ~25 TPS Still a couple orders of magnitude away from being a significant difference.
  - gruez 5y ago
    > - uses between 300x and 10000x less energy for the same security as Bitcoin right, but instead of mostly electricity being poured into mining, now it's hard drive components. It's still the same amount of dollars (resources) poured into mining. The only difference is shifting it from opex to capex. >- has the most number of farmers/validators of any blockchain valid point, although I wouldn't really chalk it up to it being "better engineered". bitcoin supports validation at the miner level (ie. you can do the validation, rather than trusting/relying on the pool) as well via getblocktemplate. It's just not widely adopted for whatever reason.

TekMol 5y ago

A crazy thing with Taproot is: A company could create a virtual bank to handle all transfers with its suppliers by doing a single onchain transaction. From the outside, it would look like a normal "Someone sent some coins from address A to address B" transaction. But internally, a key needed to spend the funds is only valid if the company and all of its suppliers sign it. This means every time there is a transaction between the company and one of its suppliers, the company would send out a signed message with the new spending conditions (the new balance of the company and every supplier) to the supplier network. Everyone signs it and that's it. It does not go on chain. Only if a participant becomes uncooperative, the latest state will go on chain and everyone will get what they own. So in the future, two transactions on the Bitcoin chain a few years apart could be "Someone sent something somewhere in December 2021 and then they send something somewhere in June 2025". Or it could be "BMW did ten thousand transactions with its suppliers". You don't know. Both look the same on chain. And all of the transactions were free, instant and possible 24/7.

teekert 5y ago
"And all of the transaction were free", Wait? Since when are transactions free and instant? Is that part of this upgrade? The only costs are with the "bank transaction"?
- TekMol 5y ago
  A second layer transaction does not involve the Bitcoin network. When Katy wants to pay ₿3 to Billie, Katy just sends a key (via email or some API) to Billie which enables Billie to withdraw ₿3 from the account of Katy. But Billie does not do that. Billie just keeps that message like you keep your login to your bank account. When Katy wants to pay another ₿5 to Billie, Katy sends a key to Billie which enables Billie to withdraw ₿8 from the account of Katy. Now Katy paid Billie ₿8 in two transactions. All via email, letter, telephone or - most likely - API. Nothing at all happened on the Bitcoin network.
  - piaste 5y ago
    However, if nothing happens on the Bitcoin network, then the funds aren't locked down, are they? In other words, Billie has no guarantee that the key she holds will be valid tomorrow; Katy could empty that account at any time, and Billie would then hold nothing except the evidence of Katy's wrongdoing.

rawtxapp 5y ago

One of the most interesting things in this experiment was the speedy trial imo. We now have an agreed way to change/improve consensus rules. It's very difficult to get a handful of people to agree on something, let alone all the different participants in this global/borderless system.

323 5y ago
That's because bitcoin is so centralized these days, that you can get all the people that matter in a room and hash things out. Note how half of the Bitcoin network nodes don't support taproot yet, but it's irrelevant. The few nodes that matter do support it.
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  > That's because bitcoin is so centralized these days Citation badly needed. For taproot to rollout, you need wallet providers, exchanges, nodes and miners to agree. There are hundreds/thousands of different participants in each one of these categories across the world. Specifically, 90% of nodes need to signal for it.
  - 323 5y ago
    It says right in the article that wallets don't support taproot either at the moment. > Specifically, 90% of nodes need to signal for it. Wrong, 90% of mined blocks need to signal it, not 90% of nodes. Big difference: > at least 90% of the blocks mined in any of the designated two-week difficulty periods "signal" their support for the upgrade, then the activation process can begin. To be more precise: 1,815 out of 2,016 blocks mined within a period have to include a little piece of encoded information that indicates that the miners who mined those blocks are in favor of the upgrade. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/06/12/locked-in-bitcoins-taproot-upgrade-gets-its-90-mandate/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/06/12/locked-in-bitcoins-...
    - Jach 5y ago
      There are a number of ways to achieve consensus, rawtxapp is right in general that many decentralized parties need to agree. For Taproot in particular, it uses BIP 8 (see https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0008.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0008.mediawi... and https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0343.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0343.mediawi... and more generally 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-...) with LockinOnTimeout=true. The effect of this is that miners cannot block the upgrade so long as the (eventual) majority of nodes wishes to have the upgrade, they can only hurry things along and mostly protect the minority of older clients who have yet to upgrade.

lightweb 5y ago

Ignore at your own potential peril.. BTCers don't care, apparently https://coingeek.com/could-taproot-privacy-features-make-btc-illegal/ https://coingeek.com/could-taproot-privacy-features-make-btc...

G3rn0ti 5y ago
All Layer 2 scaling solutions would also be obfuscating transactions because all out of chain transactions are invisible on chain.
vmception 5y ago
Exchanges that delisted privacy coins were not doing so because they were viewed as illegal. Those businesses just didn't have the risk profile to ever take anything to court to solidify the obvious reality that they're not illegal. Their relationship with the regulators is too important for them. Fortunately, CeFi exchanges are less of the volume these days than DeFi and institutional OTC. When I was using institutional OTC in the United States, they would make markets for me in Monero if I asked. If I said "I want to trade this random erc20 altcoin for Monero" they'd say "say less, we got you", and quote me a very competitive price. Same for moving dollars in and out. But I've been using DeFi AMMs all year. The DeFi bridges for bitcoin are fine as well. There are only 1 or 2 permissionless ones for Bitcoin itself, for now, but they're okay. Moving a few billion in volume already this year. The permissioned ones operate under the same risk profile and regulatory profile as exchanges do, so its not a deal breaker if you already use CeFi, and the user experience on any bridge can still be better - depending on what you want to do. Even Monero has a permissionless bridge too now, on the Secret Network. so you don't even need any exchanges or those sketchy centralized swapping services to move in and out of Monero anymore, and from Secret Network you can bridge to the broader DeFi ecosystem. This should get even better.
anonporridge 5y ago
There's game theory at play here that transcends the legal system. Yes, the US and the EU could deem these cryptocurrencies to be illegal. However, as we saw in China, all that accomplishes is squeezing it out of your borders, or squeezing it to the black market. Making it illegal would also be an insanely strong signal to the entire world that this thing actually is uncontrollable by our current governments, and that they're scared of it. Knowing they can never actively kill it, just drive it elsewhere, these societies have to take a gamble. Either assume it's eventually going to wither and die after they ban it, thereby protecting their citizens from wasting time and money on the system, or assume it's going continue to grow into being the foundation of a new global monetary system that's going to automate and consume everything that's existed before, and severely miss out on being at the vanguard of that industry.

nanna 5y ago

Can anyone explain why my genuine question below -- "When will BTC move to an energy efficient protocol?" -- was flagged? Seems a bit gratuitous?

sowbug 5y ago
I didn't flag, but if that's what you wrote, it's off-topic. It's also tedious. We get it. It uses energy by design. You can count on any HN Bitcoin discussion to bring out the environmentalist in almost anyone.
- The_Colonel 5y ago
  It's not that much off-topic given that this discussion is about Bitcoin protocol upgrade and switch to PoS is a potential protocol upgrade as well.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  It's not off-topic at all. But I can see how it's tedious.
Gosper 5y ago
I don't know why you were flagged, but if your question was in earnest: Bitcoin almost certainly won't move. Because those touted energy efficient protocols come at the cost of much weaker security guarantees which undermine a key point of Bitcoin. Proof of stake, the forerunner of energy efficient protocols, may work better for networks that have different aims, although smart contract oriented blockchains still need good security to be trusted. The stupendous levels of complexity involved in trying to hammer out proof of stake into a viable method of energy efficient mining make the approach look ever more unpromising. Ethereum keeps delaying the switch and the touted 2022 migration has once again been kicked into the long grass after this paper from a few weeks ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10086 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10086 Lead to: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42764 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42764 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42765 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42765 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42766 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42766

egypturnash 5y ago

Does Taproot do anything to reduce the absurd power consumption? If not then it just feels as useful as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic to me.

loceng 5y ago
Shhh.. Just keep looking at only the positives and the future, no time for criticism and addressing the known pitfalls!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
drak0n1c 5y ago
Yes it does, the byte size of transaction processing is smaller, and additionally many more transactions can be batched together when processing happens due to the more efficient algorithm.
Tepix 5y ago
Bitcoins biggest innovation is moving transactions off of bitcoin. That tells you all about it's capabilities really. Why bother with this outdated tech when there are vastly more capable coins out there?
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  Because there are still more people to dupe into buying ASIC miners, as well as many more who haven't broken even yet. Can't you see what's at stake?!
  - Tepix 5y ago
    Oh i thought the main motivation was to get more people to buy the coin to raise its price.
    - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago

saurik 5y ago

I am pretty sure that this upgrade was the piece needed to "more legitimately decentralize" the currency bridge between Bitcoin and rsk (rootstalk), which is the EVM-compatible smart contract layer that uses Bitcoin (bridged as rBTC) as its native gas currency (and which is being "merge mined" by a majority of the current Bitcoin hash rate and thereby isn't some weird insecure underutilized side chain).

wslh 5y ago
Typo: RSK was Rootstock: https://www.rsk.co/ https://www.rsk.co/ and has a governing organization: https://www.iovlabs.org/ https://www.iovlabs.org/

DantesKite 5y ago

I don't think the energy criticisms are that warranted. In my mind, it speaks more to a criticism of how poor our current energy infrastructure is. I don't think for example in 30 years it'll be a big problem when energy becomes more abundant and building nuclear reactors are easier. And this is coming from someone who believes Bitcoin is little more than a Ponzi scheme and most of the innovation in fintech is happening outside the cryptocurrency space. Still, it's pretty cool that changes to Bitcoin can happen like this. Makes me think eventually they'll figure out a use case for it, besides buying lattes in El Salvador.

concinds 5y ago
It does seem strange, because while I'm not too familiar with the PoW pro/cons arguments (I heard PoW was more secure than any other method, for now, but haven't verified that independently), it rubs me the wrong way to classify certain uses of electricity as "illegitimate". Some people prefer taking the plane over the train, should they be vilified? Some people like "driving around" to chill, not because they have a true transportation need. The offices near me are all lit up throughout the night. I wouldn't be surprised if when aggregated on a world level, there was a relatively significant percentage of energy just plain wasted. When AR/VR come out, hoping to replace zero-carbon-emitting IRL social interactions with heavy GPU/server-using gadgets, will people condemn that? I don't like the idea of piecemeal "bean counter" approach to new technology that happens to use energy; if there's zero point to PoW, they have a point, but if there are any security or decentralization benefits at all, it just seems like a non-problem. Treat it as a systemic problem, transition energy-use objects to electricity-use objects (like EVs), build more nuclear reactors, generate more clean-electricity, and have it not be an issue.
- dinobones 5y ago
  The "Bitcoin is destroying the world ecosystem and is awful" crowd is way too hysterical for me to take them seriously. They write about Bitcoin like it is a serious evil and injustice in the world. It honestly feels like they're just folks who regret not investing in Bitcoin.
5y ago