Bitcoin is making progress on a tech upgrade that will improve its speed, scalability and privacy. Schnorr will clear up space on the blockchain by containing signatures. The result expected is relief for transaction backlog and the high fees that go along with it.
The developers of Schnorr are estimating a 25 to 30 percent increase in Bitcoin’s transaction capacity as a result of this upgrade.
Recently, Yannick Seurin, a developer who’s been working on the Schnorr project, told CoinDesk that “Schnorr signatures and the applications they enable generate high hopes. As evidenced by the recent scaling debate, any efficiency improvement is highly beneficial to bitcoin.”
Schnorr is an improvement on the current signature system, Elliptical Curve Digital Signature Algorithm or ECDSA. Schnorr is backed by provably secure algorithms, while the current system gives no such proof. In addition, by bundling signatures that are being sent to one address, less bandwidth is used on the blockchain resulting higher efficiency and scalability.
Blockchain developer Pieter Wuille unveiled the draft outlining the technology of Schnorr and claims that this upgrade will allow for future improvements to be deployed while building toward a more efficient scaling system.
While advocating for the adoption of Schnorr, Wuille knows that it’s up to the community whether or not to integrate the new technology to the blockchain.
The movement to adopt Schnorr highlights the way the Bitcoin community implements change to the blockchain. The community must come to some kind of consensus, although it looks likely to pass as many influential Bitcoin developers are backing the project.
This would be the biggest change since the Bitcoin community had a drawn out argument over the adoption of SegWit, which was introduced as a bug fix in 2016.
