Topic: Taproot proposal - page 2. (Read 11665 times)

It would be safe not to do anything taproot related until after at least a day has passed since activation. It's usually the hours after any kind of fork where something wrong can occur, or some sort of re-org naturally happens, which may lead to loss of coins.

If you're not in a hurry, wait for new wallets or transactions to start happening before trying to do your own, it's not like previous hard forks where you have new coins on a different chain.

and gmaxwell is also quoted once again in this article

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-soft-fork-days-away-as-taproot-upgrade-closes-in

You can take the remaining number of blocks and divide it by 144 (24hours * 6 block/hour). Which is 1508/144 = 10.4 days. This is a rough estimation.

What matters most is the block height which is block 709632, the block Taproot will be activated.

According to Taproot watch, it remains 1587 blocks and the last block mined is 708045 which was five minutes ago.

708045 + 1587 = block 709632 which is most accurate.

Also Nicehash is indicating block 709632 for the activation.

Just like halving or any other block event, we can not use time to know the exact block height, but the more we are getting closer to the blcok, the more accurate we can guess the date such event will occur. As you know that block reward can be affected due to certain reasons like increasing or decreasing of mining hash rates which can alter the estimated time before mining difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks mined. So the reason time can not be used for the calculation but just for guesses.

I know we are looking for exact block height for taproot activation not so much for exact time, but I see different predictions on taproot.watch website saying that we have eleven more days left.
Nicehash also released webpage for Taproot fork countdown that is scheduled to happen in less than ten days, somewhere around November 13th.
What would you say is more correct from this two predictions or is there even something better?

To me, it seems difficult to "price in" the various kinds of technological upgrades and even something as seemingly simple as the halvening because there is such a broad swath of both current bitcoin users and even future bitcoin users who hardly have any clues about the significance of such various dynamics on this particular asset class that is difficult to understand, even by more sophisticated investors and speculators who might have been presumed to have taken up some of the informational slack in terms of knowing the meanings of these various events. 

In other words, the market does not know enough to price in these aspects, and that seems to be part of the reason why we get some lagging UPpity price reactions in regards to when the effects of the halvening becomes felt (after rather than before knowing about it), and similar with various upgrades in terms of their expanding the various powers of bitcoin, but the market does not know enough and will find out as time passes...   

We do see plenty of examples why "priced in" assertions are difficult to assert with something like bitcoin that has so many developments happening simultaneously, so in that regard, some simpler concepts like the halvening, or the more complicated ones like the impact of segregated witness (including lightning network) or even the developments that taproot facilitates are difficult to frame in some kind of simple and understandable package that is even going to be knowable by the market - and probably we have to presume that there are folks who have much more insight (asymmetric information) than others and are able to advantage while the market is catching up. and some of the diptwats presuming "priced in" fail/refuse to account for how a multitude of aspects end up coming together causing the actual BTC value to be several multitudes (and probably magnitudes) higher than what the market had been pricing it... even while we have some folks like long term BTC HODLers and even more recent entrants like Michael Saylor who come into bitcoin and hoard coins because they both recognize the future value and  in the case of Saylor he even articulates why he is doing it (and the information that Saylor proclaims still does not sink in because the market - and several of the snooze you lose participants - remains in denial.. hahahahaha)

It’s probably priced in by now, but I said the same about the halving last year and it showed my “plebness”.

I believe, after that experience, we should just agree with history. Bitcoin will continue to surge to new all time highs, six digits, like it did during 2013 to four digits, and 2017 to five digits.

here are a few more articles about the upcoming BTC taproot hardfork upgrade

https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/big-news-is-coming-for-bitcoin-keep-watch-on-november-16-2659212

i'm curious to see if Edward Moya's theory is correct ... i hope not

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/10/26/taproot-bitcoins-next-big-upgrade-might-already-be-priced-in/

As far as I can tell bitcoin core 0.21.0 had the consensus rules code for Taproot (all 3 BIPs) but not the activation code so it should ignore Taproot transactions by default even after it activates and block start containing Taproot transactions.
0.21.1 on the other hand added the activation code and should be able to detect the fact that Taproot is locked in and start verifying Taproot transactions when they are available.

Anything older than v0.21.0 (like 0.20.1 and 0.20.0) will consider Taproot a non-standard transaction and a "future witness version" and only performs basic verification on the transaction if it is in a mined block and will ignore and reject it if it comes to their mempool.

I just want to confirm that new nodes also includes 0.21.0 and 0.21.1 ? Or what is the earliest core version that has some taproot code in them already? A good chunk of the current network are still running 0.21.1 and 0.21.0, and a not insignificant are also running 0.20.1 and 0.20.0.

The role and influence of miners is often radically overstated by the general public.  People are so used to systems based on trust and authority that they automatically assume someone is "in charge" of any system they see, and miners are often the target of these assumptions.  But for both technical and economic reasons their influence is much more limited than these uninformed assumptions-- and not by accident, but due to the intentional incentives in the design of Bitcoin.

There are even parties that some might call "miners" that could reasonably argued to have almost no significant role: you could imagine a "miner" that has never even heard of bitcoin, has never used Bitcoin, and simply performs sha256^2 operations for whomever has wired them the USD.

But that said I agree with pooya87, silly extreme examples aside they're also an important part of the ecosystem with influence too (and not only because many parties that are miners are also participants in other respects as well).  JayJuanGee's points make sense as a reaction to people's *over* statement of the role of miners-- e.g. the clearly false claims that they control the system outright.   But even though the overstatements are so ubiquitous as to make a strong rebuttal the most commonly correct answer, we shouldn't forget that economies are far more nuanced than simply internet arguments and that large miners are an economically significant part of the Bitcoin ecosystem even if they aren't the rulers that the public with their authority-eccentric-brainwashing sometimes assumes they are.

Miners are far from unique in suffering over-estimates of their authority in the system too-- people do the same thing with developers and exchanges, while underestimating the importance of people who own Bitcoin and transact with Bitcoin.  This is particularly sad because the parties we can expect to be most loyal to Bitcoin are the long term holders (and after them, miners but only to the extent that their power / space / devices can't just be pointed at something else). Transacting parties that don't keep exposure will always be a bit fair-weather allies (e.g. it's common that when a merchant adds bitcoin they just integrate bitpay or similar and then accept whatever cryptocurrency the api supports-- if the API supports BSV-sue-the-bitcoin-developers-scam-token, they'll accept that too), and exchanges actually profit from market volatility, churn, and confusion.

[I think Bitcoin developers have historically been big allies, but this isn't because they're developers... it's because the long time developers are all Bitcoin holders who protect their investment by developing-- and developers that were less interested in owning bitcoins have left. Developers who just developed because they were collecting a paycheck could be expected to have miner like alignment (except with bitcoin specific expertise in the place of equipment).  ... and otherwise, just the fact of dealing with the technical details of Bitcoin makes it hard to take anything for granted and assume that other people will solve the problems.]

The real fault is the reflex that makes people mistake Bitcoin for something that has a central authority.  I can't think of too many people mistakenly assuming that varrious parties are in charge of the English language, so perhaps this flawed assumption can be cured.

I remember that part of the threat from both the big blockers (coming even prior to the Bcash fork) was that all the miners supported big blocks, so the threat was that they were going to go over to the bcash fork because it was more friendly to that idea..

They did not end up going to the bcash fork - except for opportunistically to make money and mostly temporarily.

Similar was the segwit2x threat.  So many of the big businesses (including miners) were trying to suggest that there was a need to be an economic player and to have hashing power to decide what was going to be the right bitcoin block.  The threat or bluff ended up not following through.

I am not trying to open up an old debate, but just suggesting that I largely buy into the vision that the nodes decide what is bitcoin,, and there were threats against BIG players that did not play out.. so trying to suggest that miners have some kind of meaningful say.. just seems to be getting it wrong.. and I don't consider that to be how we would want bitcoin to be anyhow...

Of course, the taproot activation was an attempt to just make sure that the miners were onboard, and surely better to avoid drama if possible.. but if push were to come to shove, there were probably quite a few nodes that would have been willing to play hardball to force the hands of miners.

Again, I am not trying to open up meaningless conversation, but I don't really buy any of the stories that either try to suggest that miners call the shots or that somehow the nodes have to cow-tow to the demands of miners... and sure hopefully in the end, miners are able to be incentivized to want to mine bitcoin both long term and short term.. and sure of course planning to mine into the future, and surely profits help with that aspect, too.


Of course, there are varying network effects that build over time, and surely satoshi structured bitcoin in such a way to have great incentives.. and yeah some of those forks do screw around with incentives and also cause distrust over their levels of decentralization.. so not as many folks are going to want to build upon various scams... I am not claiming to know everything or even attempting to describe the various incentives.. that even there can be a lot of distrust, but each person acting in their own interest and even trying to cheat bitcoin has decent chances of making bitcoin stronger..

I prefer calling it "the community" supported Taproot soft fork.

If you ask me this statement is just as wrong as saying "miners decide what chain is the real bitcoin". Bitcoin network consists of both miners and full nodes and we can't just ignore one part for the other. In any kind of fork we have to get both groups to come to an agreement.
We could even consider another component, the "economy" as part of the decision making process. That can be any bitcoin user, merchants, and all businesses that were built on top of the Bitcoin we know today. In fact one of many reasons why shitcoins such as bcash and bcashsv are considered failed attempts is exactly this.

I thought that I was attempting to make a more political rather than a technical point in terms of there potentially being a contentious upgrade and the nodes are going to be the ones that decide which fork is the actual bitcoin rather than the miners deciding .. and surely hopefully any kind of change or contention is going to be so obvious that 90% or more of the nodes are going to pick a direction to follow, which is likely to end up being the dominant chain if that many nodes go in that direction, even if miners decide to go in the opposite direction.

We have had those kinds of challenges in the past concerning differences of opinion regarding what way to go (Big blocks versus small blocks starting around 2016 and culminating in late 2017 (and continuing to linger for a while.. and to smaller extents these days), but no real follow through in which the miners ended up deciding to actually go contrary to the nodes.. at least not so far has that challenge really been put to test - even though the word on the street is that the nodes decide what chain is the real bitcoin.

This last time around (over the summer), with taproot signaling, seemed to work out a resolution in advance to allow the miners to choose to signal for taproot instead of the nodes forcing the decision upon the miners... so yeah staving off a potential contentious issue that ended up not being contentious as the 2017 block size juxtaposing ended up being with one group actually deciding to fork off (bcash) and the other side end up backing down (segwit2x).  Maybe I was attempting to make a wee bit different point - instead of getting caught up in technicalities?

I think you mean "size" not "count" because input count is the number of UTXOs (aka coins) you are spending and has nothing to do with Taproot or other pubkey script types. However the size of the witness and consequently the weight of the transaction could be* lower compared to the older types.

"Could be" because if the script spending route is chosen the witness could be bigger than a normal P2WPKH witness.

To be clear:
- Old nodes* receiving Taproot transactions in their mempool will reject the transaction as non-standard and will not propagate it to other nodes
- New nodes** will both verify and propagate Taproot transactions received in their mempool
- Old nodes receiving a new block containing Taproot transaction will not verify the said transaction*** but will propagate the block (after verifying everything else about it).
- New nodes will obviously validate everything and propagate the block.

* Old nodes are the unmodified bitcoin core nodes that don't have the code to verify Taproot transactions like 0.16.0
** New nodes are those bitcoin core nodes that have the code to verify Taproot transactions like 22.0
*** They perform some basic checks and not much else

Yes, full nodes will validate Taproot transactions and propagate it to other nodes.

More importantly is that nodes support it, right?

What do you expect from sponsored post/article?


The sentence you quoted refer to Taproot activation, so Bitcoin Core user also not required to upgrade the software due to backward compatibility.

I think that needs to be corrected, if hard fork is when a blockchain splits into two and each with different paremeters and independent of each other, then Taproot is not a hard fork but a soft fork because the upgrade is still everything about bitcoin blockchain as majority of miners supported the upgrade.

I'm not sure an article that calls Taproot a "hard" fork is worth reading, and surely enough after skimming through the article it is filled with other small and big mistakes.

A funny one: "signature algorithm allows users to generate public and private keys."!