If Bitcoin ossifies too early, then it can only scale with trust. This narrative has only been losing traction over the past few months
Discussion
This bot proves my point: nostr:npub169n9eaf0t20j0nefwqlqtnqcpsym22k2nw6e3tevtrrru4et7wrsh5w47v
We need more L2s than Lightning
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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