Will Schnorr Topple SegWit To Become Bitcoin’s Biggest Change?

By Dmitriy

BTC Wires: Schnorr, the upcoming Bitcoin upgrade, took a crucial step towards its implementation when, Peter Wuille, an influential developer, revealed a draft explaining its technicalities. This development assumes significance in the light of the fact that Schnorr is expected to enhance the scaling and privacy of Bitcoin, after having been a work in progress for many years.

This effectively means that Schnorr is the next significant change to Bitcoin making it the most prominent code change since SegWit, which itself was a crucial update that led to a battle in the bitcoin community before being adopted. Schnorr, which is necessarily a digital signature scheme, would allow the bitcoin users to generate cryptographic keys required to send and store bitcoin, in a new way. This would lead to a few other significant benefits which will solve bitcoin’s most important issues related to privacy and scalability.

Wuille added that “It is a building block for a variety of improvements,” and that there are quite a few improvements that still have not managed to get the desired attention. He feels that though the change would finally be adopted, it is going to be up to the user’s willingness to adopt it, as in the case of SegWit.

Schnorr has been co-authored by leading developers such as Johnson Lau and Gregory Maxwell. It mostly is a technical and mathematical proposal which gives outlines regarding the signature scheme to be encoded in Bitcoin. Although it is far from being the final goal, it is nonetheless an essential cog in the wheel.

As per Jonas Nick, Blockstream Engineer and Co-Author of Schnorr, “Standardizing Schnorr for bitcoin is a big step towards using it in bitcoin.” One of the major benefits of Schnorr is that its security can be proved mathematically. Additionally, developers are optimistic that it is going to lead the way towards new changes that can be developed on top of it including privacy techniques. As per Nick, Schnorr will also make the advanced transactions cheaper which otherwise grew expensive during congestion.

As per Peter Wuille, “Due to the wealth of new discoveries lately I believe these technologies should be developed in a step-by-step basis, and my focus for a first step is just Schnorr and Taproot.” Taproot is another proposed update proposed by Greg Maxwell to enhance Bitcoin’s security.

Dmitriy

Having majored in Social Psychology and Economics, I worked as a team lead of a tech and fundamental analysis lab in the Applied System Analysis Research Institute. I write financial articles for various international media. I also hold the position of a Chief Analyst at RoboForex.

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