TL;DR: Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to get Schnorr B4 Core in upgrade war. BCH Schnorr inb4 Core. However headlines are sliced, the May 15th, 2019 software upgrade from BCH developers has locked-in coveted Schnorr signatures way ahead of much better funded and marketed Bitcoin Core (BTC) dev teams. The broader cryptocurrency community is starting to take notice.

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Bitcoin Cash Gets Schnorr Before Core: Battle Victory in Upgrade War

Bitcoin Cash enthusiasts cannot stop rhyming. Getcha jaw off the floor, we gonna have Schnorr. Time to leave Core, BCH has Schnorr. BCH, we at war, bring the Schnorr. As Trust Nodes put it more elegantly, “While Blockstream’s researcher Andrew Poelstra will speak of Schnorr Signatures this May at the nicely named Magical Crypto Conference, part of Consensus Blockchain week, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) will be celebrating an upgrade that includes Schnorr Signatures.”

CoinSpice has followed the introduction of Schnorr and its debate. Developer Mark B. Lundeberg explained in tandem with other improvements Schnorr allows “very simple multi-party aggregation schemes, where multiple parties collaborate to produce one aggregated signature under one aggregated pubkey, checked with OP_CHECKSIG as in pay-to-public-key-hash (P2PKH) addresses. Avoid second-party malleability: Schnorr signatures cannot be malleated at all, even in the aggregated case, except when all signers collaborate to create a new signature from scratch.”

Trust Nodes quotes Lucas Nuzzi, Director of Technology Research at Digital Asset Research, who explains, “While the ability to fuse keys may sound trivial, the benefits of key aggregation should not be underestimated. Since multisigs are not natively supported by ECDSA, they had to be implemented in Bitcoin via a standardized smart contract (yes, Bitcoin has smart contracts too) called Pay-to-ScriptHash (P2SH). This enables users to add spend conditions called encumbrances to specify how funds can be spent e.g. ‘only unlock balance if both Alice and Bob sign this message.’”

The article continues, brutally noting, “Blockstream has also launched some code, but its actual live activation might perhaps come out later this year,” and how “Bitcoin Core might be offended by the idea that BCH will beat them to it, so perhaps they’ll rush out this proposal which was first suggested all the way back in 2014. That’s unlikely, however. There needs to be testnets, the network needs to get ready for what in BTC would be a softfork, with it all requiring quite a bit more time than two months,” Trust Nodes stressed. Hear from BCH lead developer Amaury Séchet on a recent CoinSpice Podcast episode.

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