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
Discussion
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