Altcoin News: Bitcoin Developer Has Published Two Proposals for a Privacy-Oriented Bitcoin Soft Fork

May 7, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

Bitcoin developer Peter Velle in a message to participants of the mailing list bitcoin-dev on May 6 presented two proposals for the soft fork for the taproot software.

Taproot is a solution aimed at combining the benefits of a merciless abstract syntactic tree (MAST) with the Shnorr signature scheme to limit the amount of information disclosed after the transaction.

MAST will allow you to implement alternative methods for securing the privacy of Bitcoin transactions, while the Shnorr signature will help to hide the use of MAST to verify the transaction conditions.

“Taproot will make all the exits and joint expenditures indistinguishable from one another. Merkel’s branches will hide unfulfilled branches in scripts. Signals of Shnorr will allow the software to use a collection of keys in one output“, — he writes.

The developers of Bitcoin have long thought about the methods of solving the tasks. Now that the offer has been published on GitHub, other members of the community can get acquainted with it to comment on the changes presented. If community members support a proposal, they can be integrated into the main network of cryptocurrency. It is expected that Taproot will cause less controversy than the previous soft Bitcoin for the Segregated Witness activation.

Velle noted that many different proposals were considered to be added to Taproot, but not all of them were included in the final version of the update at the moment. Thus, the work on the long-awaited integration of the SIGHASH_NOINPUT function, which will enable the expansion of Lightning Network’s capabilities, is carried out within a separate project.

Author: Marko Vidrih