Author: Matt Corallo 2018-01-23 21:23:21
Published on: 2018-01-23T21:23:21+00:00
The bitcoin community is currently discussing the adoption of Taproot, which has been proposed by Gregory Maxwell, a Bitcoin developer, as a superior approach to a native-MAST template. Taproot is a privacy-enhancing upgrade to Bitcoin's scripting capabilities that would allow for complex smart contract conditions to be made indistinguishable from normal payments, thereby increasing the anonymity set of smart contract users. This approach doesn't require any overhead in the common case or the use of sketchy or impractical techniques, nor does it require extra rounds of interaction between contract participants or durable storage of other data.Some members of the bitcoin community argue that while Taproot may offer benefits, it is not optimal and that permissionless innovation should come before application specialization. The suggestion is to enable features in a generic way first and then create specialized templates to save space for common constructions. BIPs 116 and 117 provide a reusable component that enables a generic form of MAST while also allowing other applications like honeypots, key trees, and script delegation, making the MAST feature available for use in production by the wider community. The author argues that the correct approach is to add support for generic features to accomplish the underlying goal in a user-programmable way. After activation and some usage, ways in which common use cases can be made more efficient through output specialization can be considered. The lightning protocol is still an active area of research, and we don't yet know what the globally optimal layer-2 caching protocol will be, even if we have educated guesses as to its broad structure. Therefore, a proposal right now to standardize a more compact lightning script type would be rightly rejected. It is less obvious but just as true that the same should hold for MAST.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T04:51:29.884579+00:00