Author: Joost Jager 2023-06-20 12:30:19+00:00
Published on: 2023-06-20T12:30:19+00:00
In a recent email, Joost Jager discussed the advantages of using the taproot annex in Bitcoin transactions. He highlighted that the annex's data is not included in the calculation of transaction IDs or potential parent commit transaction IDs. This feature makes the annex a powerful tool for applications that would ideally use covenants.One critical application that Joost mentioned is time-locked vaults. While proposals like OP_VAULT have received positive reception, Joost believes that pre-signed transactions signed using an ephemeral key can improve the safeguarding of Bitcoin in the short term. However, without the annex, there is a circular reference problem that prevents the simultaneous execution of vault creation and signature backup in one atomic operation. This means that if you create a vault and lose the ephemeral signatures, the funds will be lost. Joost labeled this use case for the annex as speculative, but argues that it is relevant given the importance of time-locked vaults and the difficulty of implementing soft forks. To support this use case, Joost has created a simple demo application on GitHub that demonstrates how coins can be spent to a special address and later moved to a pre-defined final destination using the annex to store the ephemeral signature. Joost hopes that this demo will raise awareness of the on-chain ephemeral signature backup functionality enabled by the annex.Overall, the taproot annex offers benefits in terms of data calculation and supports applications such as time-locked vaults. Joost's demo application serves as an example of how the annex can be used, and he hopes that it will increase understanding of the functionality the annex provides. The full email thread can be found [1].
Updated on: 2023-07-14T02:43:23.180204+00:00