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

131–140 of 237 posts

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

#131

Post by atweiden »

Tepix wrote: post #126
aeternum wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The difference being you don’t need to ask existing Bitcoin miners for permission to begin mining Bitcoin yourself. Conversely, staking is inherently impossible without first obtaining “stake” — and how can you obtain stake without the approval of existing stakers?

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

#132

Post by Hjfrf »

freddiecoleman wrote: post #98
Hjfrf wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Incorrect. Please see https://twitter.com/0xfreddieC/status/1457289838470782978 Disclaimer; I run a Chia blockchain explorer

Why comment "incorrect" on a factually true statement?

It's fine that you believe the dev is a nice person and will never dump on you, but they absolutely do hold a vast majority of issued chia.

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

#133

Post by UncleEntity »

nybble41 wrote: post #113
G3rn0ti wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent talks about the „Lightning Network“ — a Layer 2 scaling solution for Bitcoin. Beware: I am still a crypto noob but I am still going to try to explain how I understood the system so far. Edited: Minor terminology and typos. Roughly speaking the Lightning Network works similar to a „current account“ that businesses have between each other but does not require the actors to trust each other. The parties initiate…

The other half of the Taproot update besides Schnorr signatures is support for MASTs: Merklized Abstract Syntax Trees. This allows you to create scripts (smart contracts) where only the used part of the script needs to be revealed when the funds are transferred. Other parts which were not used—for example, the clauses related to recovering funds in the event of a non-cooperating peer in a Lightning channel when the c…

So, basically, a dead code elimination scheme?

I do wonder how it could ensure the code running is the actual code signed for as its hash would be different though.

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

#134

Post by skybrian »

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.

The prize money flowing to miners doesn’t change so energy usage won’t change. (You can think of this as fixed overhead that’s proportional to Bitcoin’s price, regardless of what transactions do.)

However, the transactions do more so arguably the cost/benefit ratio improves a bit. Measuring this might be hard without a clear definition of what the benefit of a transaction is.

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

#135

Post by saurik »

I am pretty sure that this upgrade was the piece needed to "more legitimately decentralize" the currency bridge between Bitcoin and rsk (rootstalk), which is the EVM-compatible smart contract layer that uses Bitcoin (bridged as rBTC) as its native gas currency (and which is being "merge mined" by a majority of the current Bitcoin hash rate and thereby isn't some weird insecure underutilized side chain).

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

#136

Post by ashwagary »

loceng wrote: post #108
anonporridge wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People had little problem with transportation when all they had was horses and sailboats. Just because you don't technically have a problem doing something now and no one is complaining, doesn't mean there's not a drastically more efficient way to do the thing, and those organizations that start doing the more efficient thing rapidly out compete and make irrelevant those who hold onto the legacy ways.

Bitcoin is the horse and buggy in this comparison - while attempting to naively remove control possibilities and making it "trustless" aka a free for all/wildwest where nations can't use financial levers to try to economically punish known bad actors, e.g. Magnitsky Act.

>where nations can't use financial levers to try to economically punish known bad actors, e.g. Magnitsky Act.

Probably unknowable but I wonder what has caused more damage to the world, financial crimes or centralized financial levers being used to steal the time/savings/wealth of 8 billion people and redistribute it to a small group of people.

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

#137

Post by beaner »

323 wrote: post #36
TekMol wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know?

Because there are no articles about big companies having money transfer problems with their suppliers. The complains are about the "buy now pay 90 days later" part, not about the actual money transfer.

I've heard stories about the difficulty about payments at AirBnB, where the suppliers are local people across the globe in different languages with varying levels of access to financial services. It's one of the things that inspired the Coinbase founder, who was an ex-AirBnB employee, to start his company.

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

#138

Post by wayoutthere »

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.

The banks themselves launder money for organized crime. Why shouldn’t money laundering be available to the masses too?

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

#139

Post by Macha »

baby wrote: post #82
pyrale wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

BTC is not built to support KYC/AML.

You could even go further:

BTC is built to not support KYC/AML.

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

#140

Post by k20CuozQmk »

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.

>and be made illegal eventually

Allocation of resources to try and ban cryptocurrency (or encryption in general) is probably one of the dumbest things ever conceived, probably even more so than the drug war.

Post reply on HN