Bitcoin for these users is effectively no more anonymous than a bank account, although this loss of anonymity takes place at the point of entry into the currency and is not a feature of the bitcoin protocol itself. For users and organizations who have a fixed maximum price they’re willing to pay in fees per transaction, using segwit could significantly reduce confirmation time for their transactions during periods of high activity. For a given fee, it’s expected that users of segwit will sometimes wait less time for confirmation than legacy users, with native segwit users gaining the greatest advantage. The RPC already added a checksum to any descriptor provided without one, but it also normalized the descriptor by removing private keys and making other changes users might not want. Also included are our regular sections about bech32 sending support and notable code changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects. Engineers will learn about these technologies and how they apply to their own products and services, build schnorr and taproot wallet implementations, and have an opportunity to take part in the feedback process for these proposed changes to the Bitcoin protocol. True for wallets that have private keys disabled (i.e. that are only useful as watch-only wallets).
For example, nodes are now penalized in the routing preference database if they produce an error message that they shouldn’t be generating given their particular role in a transaction (e.g. intermediate node or final node). 3391 always returns the same error message for failed payments in order to avoid leaking whether or not an invoice exists. 2.2 Result 2: SmartChain Verification Failed! One of these coordinates is odd and one is even, so the oddness bit allows verifiers to pick the correct coordinate, preventing them from having to try both combinations during verification (which would slow down verification in general and eliminate any benefits from batch signature verification). In some cases, this may have been done for privacy benefits (e.g. Bitcoin Core currently tries to match the type of change output to the type of payment output) but, in most cases, this seems like a missed opportunity for wallets to send change to their own bech32 addresses for increased fee savings. Week 22 of 24 in a series about allowing the people you pay to access all of segwit’s benefits.
For example, a motivation for the change was allowing bloom filters to be provided to particular peers (such as a user’s own lightweight wallet) even if the filters are disabled by default. As of this writing, here are what we think are some of the most significant bech32-related insights we’ve gleaned from creating and reviewing the Compatibility Matrix. We’ve frequently mentioned the fee savings available to people spending segwit inputs, but we’ve never before mentioned that you don’t need to take advantage of the savings. ● New Optech Compatibility Matrix: a new feature on the Optech website shows what wallets and services support certain recommended features, currently opt-in Replace-by-Fee (RBF) and segwit (with more comparisons planned for the future). However, many of these wallets also use P2SH-wrapped segwit addresses for receiving change sent from themselves to themselves. This week’s newsletter notes a change to Bitcoin Core’s consensus logic and announces a new feature on the Optech website for tracking technology adoption between different wallets and services. ● Lack of bech32 change address support: because sending to bech32 addresses is still not universally supported, it makes sense for segwit-compatible wallets to generate P2SH-wrapped segwit receiving addresses by default. After describing at length both the basic protocol and several possible variations, Bishop made a second post describing one case where it would still be possible to steal from the vaults, although he also suggests a partial mitigation that would limit losses to a percentage of the protected funds and he requests proposals for the smallest necessary change to Bitcoin’s consensus rules to fully mitigate the risk.
● Proposed change to schnorr pubkeys: Pieter Wuille started a thread on the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list requesting feedback on a proposal to switch bip-schnorr and bip-taproot to using 32-byte public keys instead of the 33-byte compressed pubkeys previously proposed. This week’s newsletter briefly describes two discussions on the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list, one about Bitcoin vaults and one about reducing the size of public keys used in taproot. This would save one vbyte for each payment to a taproot output (potentially thousands of vbytes per block if most users migrate to taproot) and Bitcoinxxo.com 0.25 vbytes for each public key included in a script-path spend. ● Optech schnorr/taproot workshops: Optech is hosting workshops in San Francisco (September 24) and New York (September 27) on schnorr signatures and taproot. The News section from this week’s newsletter introduced a new feature on the Optech website. This is why the feeling of being persecuted is an almost universal feature of crowds: it reflects the awareness of this dual threat to the crowd, both from the outside and from within. However, such a reorganization would require an amount of proof of work roughly equal to the annual output of all active Bitcoin miners (at the time of writing), so this is considered to be both very unlikely and indicative of a threat that could prevent consensus formation anyway.
