Blockstream's Pieter Wuille Proposes Tree Signatures for Improved and Flexible Multisig Bitcoin Transactions

Blockstream and bitcoin core developer Pieter Wuille introduced the concept of tree signatures to create a more efficient multi-sig method with enhanced privacy. Tree signatures can be coded only in the extended Alpha scripting language and can implement M-of-N multi-sig transactions more efficiently than bitcoin scripting, as it requires more than one keyholder to participate. With tree signatures, only the keys actually used for signing are exposed to the public. For instance, in a 1-of-N multisig policy, only one key is revealed on spending and the other keys stay hidden. Bitcoin and....

In particular, ROAST has been posited as a signature standard that could work with, and improve, threshold signature schemes such as FROST (Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold Signatures). The research unit of Bitcoin (BTC)-focused blockchain tech firm Blockstream has published a proposal for a new type of multisig standard called Robust Asynchronous Schnorr Threshold Signatures (ROAST). It hopes to avoid the problem of transaction failures due to absent or even malicious signers and can work at scale. The term multisig or multisignature, refers to a method of transaction in which....

Developers don't want to move too fast. The Bitcoin Improvement Proposals 340 through 342 were merged into the Bitcoin codebase on Thursday, signaling that the anticipated Taproot upgrade is ready.Taproot and the associated technology of Schnorr signatures are considered to be the most important upgrade for Bitcoin in the past year. It is primarily a privacy improvement for complex spending conditions on Bitcoin like multisig transactions, time locks and other conditions based on Bitcoin Script.As Cointelegraph reported previously, Taproot hides every additional spending condition beyond....

If one proposal excited attendees at the recent Scaling Bitcoin workshop in Hong Kong, Bitcoin Core and Blockstream developer Dr. Pieter Wuille's Segregated Witness was it. Praised by many within the technical community, Segregated Witness is expected to improve Bitcoin's performance in a number of ways, while some even hope it might be the scaling solution that helps bring some peace back to the Bitcoin community. The first part of our three-part Segregated Witness series covered how it works. In this second part: What it does. Increasing the Effective Block Size Without Increasing the....

Andrew Poelstra is a mathematician at Blockstream and was recently part of a panel discussion on improvements for Bitcoin at the 2016 MIT Bitcoin Expo. During the panel, Poelstra discussed Confidential Transactions, which is a privacy-enhancing feature he has been working on with Blockstream co-founders and Bitcoin Core contributors Greg Maxwell and Pieter Wuille. One of the main reasons Blockstream is working on Confidential Transactions is to preserve the censorship-resistant properties of Bitcoin and other blockchains. Although scalability solutions have been a major area of contention....