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

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

#141

Post by Macha »

anonporridge wrote: post #96
lightweb wrote: post #20

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

There's game theory at play here that transcends the legal system. Yes, the US and the EU could deem these cryptocurrencies to be illegal. However, as we saw in China, all that accomplishes is squeezing it out of your borders, or squeezing it to the black market. Making it illegal would also be an insanely strong signal to the entire world that this thing actually is uncontrollable by our current governments, and tha…

A currency that is not usable in China _or_ the West is inherently less valuable. Most of the bitcoin users are speculators, not people enamored by its value as a currency, and if they need to go to Lebanon to withdraw their gains in a fiat currency, then that is a serious negative.

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

#142

Post by cgb223 »

TekMol wrote: 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 if I’m a single supplier and I want to act as a hostile actor in order to negotiate better terms or something, does my refusing to sign mean that _all_ supplier transactions are reversed or at least slowed on chain? Is there an actual attack surface here?

Also, if I’m adding a new supplier in this example, do I have to spin up an entirely new “virtual bank” to do so? Or can I just add them to the current one? What is the user experience there?

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

#143

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

pyrale wrote: post #79
TekMol wrote: 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.

KYC is up to the exchange to implement. There's nothing stopping them from keeping additional records that aren't on the Bitcoin blockchain in order to stay compliant.

Of course there's also nothing stopping you from sending your coins somewhere with reduced reporting and spending them from there, but then there never really was in the first place.

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

#144

Post by lancemurdock »

323 wrote: post #31
TekMol wrote: 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…

BMW and it's suppliers have zero problems moving money today.

try not to focus on the alice and bob portion of the explanation

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

#145

Post by cgb223 »

TekMol wrote: post #14
teekert wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And all of the transaction were free", Wait? Since when are transactions free and instant? Is that part of this upgrade? The only costs are with the "bank transaction"?

A second layer transaction does not involve the Bitcoin network. When Katy wants to pay ₿3 to Billie, Katy just sends a key (via email or some API) to Billie which enables Billie to withdraw ₿3 from the account of Katy. But Billie does not do that. Billie just keeps that message like you keep your login to your bank account. When Katy wants to pay another ₿5 to Billie, Katy sends a key to Billie which enables Billie…

> VIA email or API

Isn’t this an example of a centralized bottleneck?

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

#146

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

Tepix wrote: post #118
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.

Bitcoins biggest innovation is moving transactions off of bitcoin. That tells you all about it's capabilities really. Why bother with this outdated tech when there are vastly more capable coins out there?

Because there are still more people to dupe into buying ASIC miners, as well as many more who haven't broken even yet. Can't you see what's at stake?!

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

#147

Post by xorcist »

nanna wrote: post #55
Gosper wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

PoS is something fundamentally different from PoW. PoS-like ideas were around since before PoW, but such a system can never be used in a trustless way, which was what PoW enabled.

So it's fair to say that Bitcoin could never "transition" to PoS since the whole premise from the start was that it wasn't! It could not exist before. Now that it exist, and has been shown to work, it has caused a cambrian explosion of sorts of protocols with less reliance on trustlessness. But they solve a different problem.

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

#148

Post by Hjfrf »

ulzeraj wrote: post #112
snarf21 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: Can't a government block it at the ISP level? They could also make out of country VPN illegal. How would BTC work in practicality under those conditions?

Then we go to spaaaaace https://blockstream.com/satellite/ Semi-serious jokes aside (the block stream satellite can receive blocks but not broadcast), the protocol can operate under Tor in which the bitcoin core daemon is very well integrated. If worst come to happen, sneaker net is somewhat popular ( https://opendime.com ) and people have transacted using radio waves as a proof of concept ( https://satoshi.radio.br/…

Peer to peer on-chain transactions seem unkillable at this point.

Surely governments would target exchanges instead?

Without the dollars coming from retail investors, the value proposition for speculators disappears.

You could still trade bitcoin (slowly) at that point, but converting to fiat would be difficult.

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

#149

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

Macha wrote: post #141
anonporridge wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's game theory at play here that transcends the legal system. Yes, the US and the EU could deem these cryptocurrencies to be illegal. However, as we saw in China, all that accomplishes is squeezing it out of your borders, or squeezing it to the black market. Making it illegal would also be an insanely strong signal to the entire world that this thing actually is uncontrollable by our current governments, and tha…

A currency that is not usable in China _or_ the West is inherently less valuable. Most of the bitcoin users are speculators, not people enamored by its value as a currency, and if they need to go to Lebanon to withdraw their gains in a fiat currency, then that is a serious negative.

We don't consider dollars less valuable if they're paid via American Express, even though it's less accepted than Visa.

As long as there's a critical mass of users somewhere, the "who accepts what" problem reduces to a software problem that most people will ignore.

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

#150

Post by pshc »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #107
TekMol wrote: 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…

How is this different from the lightning network?

It sounds quite similar except it hasn’t solved the problem that Lightning has—participants can broadcast old states to rewind history.

Probably should just use Lightning instead?

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