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Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated upgrade, has activated

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71–80 of 237 posts

Re: Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated upgrade, has activated

#71

Ignore at your own potential peril.. BTCers don't care, apparently https://coingeek.com/could-taproot-privacy-features-make-btc...

Exchanges that delisted privacy coins were not doing so because they were viewed as illegal. Those businesses just didn't have the risk profile to ever take anything to court to solidify the obvious reality that they're not illegal. Their relationship with the regulators is too important for them.

Fortunately, CeFi exchanges are less of the volume these days than DeFi and institutional OTC. When I was using institutional OTC in the United States, they would make markets for me in Monero if I asked. If I said "I want to trade this random erc20 altcoin for Monero" they'd say "say less, we got you", and quote me a very competitive price. Same for moving dollars in and out.

But I've been using DeFi AMMs all year.

The DeFi bridges for bitcoin are fine as well. There are only 1 or 2 permissionless ones for Bitcoin itself, for now, but they're okay. Moving a few billion in volume already this year. The permissioned ones operate under the same risk profile and regulatory profile as exchanges do, so its not a deal breaker if you already use CeFi, and the user experience on any bridge can still be better - depending on what you want to do.

Even Monero has a permissionless bridge too now, on the Secret Network. so you don't even need any exchanges or those sketchy centralized swapping services to move in and out of Monero anymore, and from Secret Network you can bridge to the broader DeFi ecosystem.

This should get even better.

Re: Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated upgrade, has activated

#72
post #49
post #47

Can anyone explain why my genuine question below -- "When will BTC move to an energy efficient protocol?" -- was flagged? Seems a bit gratuitous?

I didn't flag, but if that's what you wrote, it's off-topic. It's also tedious. We get it. It uses energy by design. You can count on any HN Bitcoin discussion to bring out the environmentalist in almost anyone.

It's not that much off-topic given that this discussion is about Bitcoin protocol upgrade and switch to PoS is a potential protocol upgrade as well.

Re: Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated upgrade, has activated

#73
post #47

Can anyone explain why my genuine question below -- "When will BTC move to an energy efficient protocol?" -- was flagged? Seems a bit gratuitous?

Because it is offensive. Bitcoin is, always will be, a proof of work cryptocurrency. If you do not understand why, take time to learn why.

Re: Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated upgrade, has activated

#74
post #50
post #47

Can anyone explain why my genuine question below -- "When will BTC move to an energy efficient protocol?" -- was flagged? Seems a bit gratuitous?

I don't know why you were flagged, but if your question was in earnest: Bitcoin almost certainly won't move. Because those touted energy efficient protocols come at the cost of much weaker security guarantees which undermine a key point of Bitcoin. Proof of stake, the forerunner of energy efficient protocols, may work better for networks that have different aims, although smart contract oriented blockchains still nee…

Here's one of Ethereum's lead researchers talking about the attacks in that paper. The fixes are simple and not expected to delay the merge.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/11/02/finalized-no-31/

Re: Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated upgrade, has activated

#75
post #5

A snarky tweet from Bram Cohen of Chia (which has had taproot and graftroot enabled since launch in March): > Congratulations to Bitcoin for joining the club of UTXO-based cryptocurrencies which have taproot enabled. https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/1459755439294275584

real money testnets have often been useful to help Bitcoin reach consensus on constitutional amendments

Re: Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated upgrade, has activated

#76
post #67
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this stop a double spend?

Yes, why wouldn't it? The funds are locked in a 2 of 2 multisig address.

I'm confused then, doesn't this still need one transaction in the block chain for every transaction?

Re: Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated upgrade, has activated

#77
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems petty. Of course it’s easier to make changes when you just launched and there are less parties and more centralization at a leadership level. 8 months doesn’t really seem like something worthy to brag over.

Well, Bitcoin still doesn't have graftroot so it's 8 months and counting :) And Lord help me I'm talking about crypto on hacker news but Chia seems just better engineered overall: - uses between 300x and 10000x less energy for the same security as Bitcoin - has the most number of farmers/validators of any blockchain - supports around ~25 transactions per second (as opposed to bitcoin's 5) - very efficient and auditab…

The biggest problem with chia is still that Bram owns almost all of the tokens.

I see no reason to donate to his personal charity.

Re: Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated upgrade, has activated

#78
post #41
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, if nothing happens on the Bitcoin network, then the funds aren't locked down, are they? In other words, Billie has no guarantee that the key she holds will be valid tomorrow; Katy could empty that account at any time, and Billie would then hold nothing except the evidence of Katy's wrongdoing.

> However, if nothing happens on the Bitcoin network, then the funds aren't locked down, are they? they are locked down. the funds in a lightning channel are locked in a 2 of 2 multisig address, and can only be moved upon mutual consent (ie. by updating the state of the channel), or by one party after sufficient time has passed (in case of an uncooperative peer).

Whoa now, how did we start talking about lightning? Has it been lightning all the time? Because that's always supported instant, near-free transactions (with a _bunch_ of problems too, that I'll not worry about).

Re: Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated upgrade, has activated

#79
post #6

A crazy thing with Taproot is: A company could create a virtual bank to handle all transfers with its suppliers by doing a single onchain transaction. From the outside, it would look like a normal "Someone sent some coins from address A to address B" transaction. But internally, a key needed to spend the funds is only valid if the company and all of its suppliers sign it. This means every time there is a transaction…

So basically, does that mean KYC/AML are officially dead in BTC's environment? The picture was not bright before, but with this kind of innovations, it seems impossible for this network to build banking systems that respect regulations.

Re: Taproot, Bitcoin’s long-anticipated upgrade, has activated

#80
post #77
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Bitcoin still doesn't have graftroot so it's 8 months and counting :) And Lord help me I'm talking about crypto on hacker news but Chia seems just better engineered overall: - uses between 300x and 10000x less energy for the same security as Bitcoin - has the most number of farmers/validators of any blockchain - supports around ~25 transactions per second (as opposed to bitcoin's 5) - very efficient and auditab…

The biggest problem with chia is still that Bram owns almost all of the tokens. I see no reason to donate to his personal charity.

Fuuaarrrk. Got' Em.
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