Responding purely to one point as this may be sufficient to clear up lots of discussion:
On 2/9/20 8:19 PM, Bryan Bishop via bitcoin-dev wrote: > Is Taproot just a probability assumption about the frequency and > likelihood of > the signature case over the script case? Is this a good assumption? The BIP > only goes as far as to claim that the advantage is apparent if the outputs > *could be spent* as an N of N, but doesn't make representations about > how likely > that N of N case would be in practice compared to the script paths. Perhaps > among use cases, more than half of the ones we expect people to be doing > could be > spent as an N of N. But how frequently would that path get used? > Further, while > the *use cases* might skew toward things with N of N opt-out, we might > end up in > a power law case where it's the one case that doesn't use an N of N opt > out at > all (or at a de minimis level) that becomes very popular, thereby making > Taproot > more costly then beneficial. Its not just about the frequency and likelihood, no. If there is a clearly-provided optimization for this common case in the protocol, then it becomes further more likely that developers put in the additional effort required to make this possibility a reality. This has a very significant positive impact on user privacy, especially those who wish to utilize more advanced functionality in Bitcoin. Further, yes, it is anticipated that the N of N case is possible to take in the vast majority of deployed use-cases for advanced scripting systems, ensuring that it is maximally efficient to do so (and thereby encouraging developers to do so) is a key goal in this work. Matt _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
