Schnorr May Be Bitcoin’s Biggest Change

Bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille created even more excitement in the community about the Schnorr signature after he released a draft last week that outlined the upgrade’s technical make-up. This idea has been in the works for years now, and with this release, the upgrade is that much closer to completion, which the community hopes will improve the privacy and scaling of the world’s number one cryptocurrency.

What is Schnorr?

Despite its funny name, Schnorr signatures is an upgrade in Bitcoin’s code, which will replace the Blockchain’s existing signature scheme with another that will fuse all signature data together.

The reason why this move is generating so much excitement is that once all the signatures are mashed together, a lot of space would be freed up in the Blockchain, would do a lot towards resolving the issues of transaction backlog as well as the frequently high fees that Bitcoin users have to pay.

According to the developers, the implementation of the Schnorr signature will improve Bitcoin’s transaction capacity by 25% to 30% of what it currently is.

Challenges to Schnorr Development

The Schnorr signature has been many years in the making. In fact, development started on this upgrade in 2012. There are multiple reasons why it is taking so long for this upgrade to be completed.

Firstly, a change such as Schnorr is complex and there are not enough developers who have the expertise in cryptography as well as Bitcoin to help with such a change.

Another reason is that such a change would require extensive peer reviewing as well as testing since it would impact a more-than-$100 billion blockchain network.

And then, according to Wuille, there the loss obvious roadblocks. For example, last year, the developers found a rogue attack on the Schnorr implementation. They team submitted a paper on the possible fix, however the academic board rejected that solution, pointing to another paper (even though it did not related to Bitcoin) that had a more robust answer.

Which led the team to rope in French cybersecurity agency ANSSI’s Yannick Seurin to help with the development of the signature. Seurin then worked with George Maxwell, a Bitcoin Core contributor, and Andrew Poelstra, a Bitcoin mathematician, to resolve this issue.

There have been other fixes required for the developing signature before it reached this stage of the team being able to release an outline of Schnorr’s technical makeup. And while it will take some time before the project is completed, this release has been a critical step in the development of the upgrade.

Once it is implemented, Schnorr will be the biggest code change since the SegWit (Segregated Witness) code change was finally adopted last year.