a little tl;dr on taproot, segwit and ordinals

taproot is a type of HD key scheme where you have the parent key and then a "tweak" value.

a simple taproot key can have no tweak, and its derived private key is the hash of the original private key, and the public key is derived from that.

a taproot key with a tweak is where you concatenate the private key with an arbitrary string of bytes, in a similar way as a HD key derivation, but of course it can be anything, even the binary bytes of a compiled ethereum solidity script.

it is not material to bitcoin what you used in the tweak, it does not interpret it.

it is not material to bitcoin that there is any tweak at all, this is all inside the key generation and derivation process.

it took me a while to wrap my head around it, because in the code it seems like all this derivation is important, but it is not.

the receiver must have the private key and the "tweak" values in order to spend the received sats.

the derived private key that generated the address is not normally stored in the algorithms, but it could be.

TAPROOT IS JUST A SCHNORR SIGNATURE BASED KEY.

segwit, on the other hand, the cryptography of it is not so important to how it works as the fact that it allows you to make transactions with extremely large amounts of arbitrary data, after opcodes like OP_RETURN.

until 2021, nobody really seriously exploited this for anything much larger than about 20kb. then someone dumped a transaction using segwit with over 30kb of data in it, some 999 signatures or something, and lightning was broken temporarily because BTCD code had put a limit, that is not specified in the segwit BIP, as a protection against resource exhaustion attacks.

then the light dawned to the shitcoiner community that they could drive up bitcoain fees and clog the chain by publishing huge transactions, so tehy cooked up scamms like Ordinals, to make their justification for making transactions with ginormous amounts of data in them, and the miners of course were ok with this because during the bear markets tx volumes are thinner and the block rewards are thus lower.

shitcoiners and miners are who benefit from segwit.

segwit was not essential for Lightning. it just made it a bit more secure.

at the time, Schnorr signatures were an option that was discussed, but it was rejected.

this was the wrong decision, obviously.

i don't know how bitcoin is going to recover from the spamfest that ordinals created, but please....

it's not taproot that enabled ordinals, it was segwit.