Bitcoin Core Devs Reveal How Schnorr Signatures Can Help Scale Bitcoin

[abdmuiz]

Four Bitcoin (ftp://Bitcoin) developers have released a paper outlining how Schnorr multi-signatures (‘multisig’) can help scale the Bitcoin Blockchain (ftp://Bitcoin Blockchain)

In the paper, published Jan. 15, Greg Maxwell, Andrew Poelstra, Yannick Seurin and Pieter Wuille discuss and illustrate
how the technology, which ‘bunches’ multisig data together to reduce its size in a transaction,“could improve both
performance and user privacy in Bitcoin

Multisig has seen wide use in various applications for Bitcoin over the past several years. Its trademark security benefits are a principal feature of some consumer wallet applications, and this week’s paper pays attention to how Schnorr multisig also offers enhanced transaction privacy

Bitcoin scaling solutions continue to be in urgent demand as a variety of improvements  (ftp://demand as a variety of improvements)move ever closer to mainstream acceptance

Chief among those in January is the Lightning Network, a so-called layer 2 protocol that facilitates near-zero-fee
transactions for Bitcoin, processed almost instantly

Mainnet Lightning transactions are still in the “testing phase as Blockstream engineers put it in a post Jan.16,
and are happening on a small scale, with only around 50 nodes and 80 channels in operation.

Schnorr signatures have long been a favorite for technical commentators, receiving praise from Blockchain consultant Sam
Wouters for security benefits last July. Wouters explained the significance of the technology in a post, saying

At the end of the day, if it is just one person sending that transaction from multiple sources,
there should be some way to do so with just one signature, right? This is what Schnorr signatures allow us to do