Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

coindesk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 237 posts

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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

Gosper wrote: post #50
nanna wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by throwaway55421 »

bigdubs wrote: post #88
baby wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC is not built to support KYC/AML.

Then it's going to be weaponized to launder money and be made illegal eventually.

There is no future tense here.

Bitcoin is designed to be fungible - it's digital cash.

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

#123

Post by drak0n1c »

egypturnash wrote: post #95

Does Taproot do anything to reduce the absurd power consumption? If not then it just feels as useful as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic to me.

Yes it does, the byte size of transaction processing is smaller, and additionally many more transactions can be batched together when processing happens due to the more efficient algorithm.

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

#124

Post by aron_misj »

mikevm wrote: post #109
vb6sp6 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then it's going to be weaponized to launder money We should stick with USD. No one does anything illegal with USD

Yes, which is why all ransomwares ask money in USD, right?

> ransomwares

this is not even worth looking at compared to other money-related crimes (just new and in media so people are scared)

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

#125

Post by kordlessagain »

pkulak wrote: post #78
gruez wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

> In parallel to that, we plan to use Taproot’s new “tapleaf” script versioning scheme to implement Simplicity, our upcoming blockchain programming language.

https://medium.com/blockstream/taproot-activation-enhanced-t...

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

#126

Post by Tepix »

aeternum wrote: post #85
nanna wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really was in earnest! I don't keep up with crypto news so just assumed this was something being worked on somehow. Your answer would have fitted well with the thread that responded to my question! As difficult as the vulnerabilities of PoS are to solve, at least there's nothing yet to say that they can't be solved given enough work; wheras, from what everyone is saying, the energy problem is essential to PoW as s…

With PoW all that burned energy creates a strong root of trust. How do you establish that root of trust with PoS? Currently approaches are ultimately circular, IE trust it because the majority holders of the coin are continually voting to trust it.

You need a good initial distribution.

With Bitcoin mining pools it looks like there's just as much centralization (if not more) as with proof of stake.

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

#127

Post by atweiden »

baby wrote: post #87
nanna wrote: 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?

It's highly unlikely that Bitcoin will move towards a proof of stake protocol without strong incentives (like regulations). The whole point of the proof of stake was to make the protocol censorship resistant.

> Overcoming censorship is not possible in a PoS system, as the censor has acquired majority stake and cannot be unseated. As such PoS systems are not censorship-resistant and the theory is therefore invalid.

https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o...

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

#129

Post by wcoenen »

egypturnash wrote: post #95

Does Taproot do anything to reduce the absurd power consumption? If not then it just feels as useful as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic to me.

No. How the space on the block chain is used doesn't really factor into that.

The ceiling for the power usage of bitcoin can be estimated by taking the value of the bitcoin that is mined in total each hour (say 6 blocks/hour * 6.25 BTC * 60K $/BTC = 2.25M dollars/hour) and dividing it by the cost of electricity (e.g. (2.25M $/hour) / 0.05 $/kWh = 45 gigawatt). As long as miners are using less electricity than that, they can make more profit by expanding their operations.

(It's a bit more complicated because of capital costs and operational costs other than electricity etc. but I think it's a good rough estimate to start with.)

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

#130

Post by fijiaarone »

rawtxapp wrote: post #34
323 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because bitcoin is so centralized these days, that you can get all the people that matter in a room and hash things out. Note how half of the Bitcoin network nodes don't support taproot yet, but it's irrelevant. The few nodes that matter do support it.

> That's because bitcoin is so centralized these days Citation badly needed. For taproot to rollout, you need wallet providers, exchanges, nodes and miners to agree. There are hundreds/thousands of different participants in each one of these categories across the world. Specifically, 90% of nodes need to signal for it.

In other words: "La la la, I can't hear you".

Either admit that bitcoin is centralized, or contend that it isn't. Don't just ask for a footnote.

Post reply on HN