Subnostr

If Bitcoin ossifies too early, then it can only scale with trust. This narrative has only been losing traction over the past few months

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 2y ago

i personally think none of the changes since satoshi's disappearance have been good except for schnorr signatures

i 🧡 ossification

schnorr signatures would not have been a protocol change just a small change in the computation of signatures, and a neat consistent 64 byte signature that can be aggregated off-chain without affecting the protocol

ossification means nothing changes, right?

nothing except for schnorr signatures has made any difference and it was only bad luck for all of us that schnorr signatures were not in the protocol from block zero

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Discussion

21 Stackage 🦡 2y ago

I want more functionality on the protocol layer in order to minimize trust, alleviate fee pressure, and never have to open a Microstrategy/JP Morgan Lightning account. Then again, I don't have a dev background, so I could be missing a few things here

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 2y ago

schnorr signatures solved the signature malleability problem that instead that gave us segwit - and it was only a year or two later that schnorr's patent expired

segwit's signature malleability was the main problem that stopped LN

imo people are a bit in denial about segwit as it really did weaken the protocol more than it strengthened it

21 Stackage 🦡 2y ago

I have a lot more research to do. I heard accounts that SegWit was disruptive to development but didn't look much further into it

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 2y ago

the malleability problem was a big obstacle for making an interactive protocol like LN

i'm pretty sure it's one of the major benefits (other than faster computation) of schnorr signatures

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 2y ago

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/69317/why-was-transaction-malleability-fix-required-for-lightning-network

https://medium.com/bitbees/what-the-heck-is-schnorr-52ef5dba289f

This concludes the ECDSA signing and verification algorithm. Even though the process is simple, there are few limitations of ECDSA like non-linearity, signature malleability, etc. These issues do not exist in the case of Schnorr signatures. Schnorr is inherently non-malleable and is linear, which opens up the door of a lot of cool new cryptographic tools in Bitcoin like MuSig, Adopter Signature, Cross-Input signature aggregation, etc. In the next section, we delve deep into the signing and verification algorithm of Schnorr signatures.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 2y ago

i never bothered to actually memorize the facts about schnorr signatures

it was registered in 1989/90 and expired in 2008

it could have been used in bitcoin but it had seen little real use in the field and there was few implementations

i just use these things... such details don't matter a lot beyond "is this correct implementation, ok good"

but schnorr would have made it possible to simplify and make bitcoin much more secure and less vulnerable to a plausible argument for changing the protocol, that point is correct