Schnorr Is Looking Poised to Become Bitcoin's Biggest Change Since SegWit

Schnorr is coming.... In fact, the bitcoin upgrade arguably took its most significant step yet toward implementation last week when influential developer Pieter Wuille unveiled a draft outlining its technical makeup.

Effectively, this sets up Schnorr as the next big change to bitcoin, meaning it will be the largest code change since Segregated Witness, a pivotal bug fix that prompted a drawn-out battle in the bitcoin community last year before ultimately being adopted.

At a technical level, adding support for Schnorr, a digital signature scheme, would give bitcoin users a new way to generate the cryptographic keys they need to used to store and send bitcoin.

Co-authored by several top bitcoin developers, including the likes of Bitcoin Core contributor Johnson Lau and Gregory Maxwell, the technical, math-ridden proposal outlines the exact signature scheme that could be coded in bitcoin.

"Standardizing Schnorr for bitcoin is a big step towards using it in bitcoin."

Though the full description can be read in the highly-technical BIP, the main idea is it describes the math necessary to produce Schnorr signatures, offering an alternative to Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm, the sole algorithm used to produce keys and verify transactions in bitcoin today.

"Due to the wealth of new discoveries lately I believe these technologies should be developed in a step-by-step basis, and my focus for a first step is just Schnorr and Taproot," Wuille said, referring to the bitcoin improvement "Taproot" proposed earlier this year by another influential bitcoin developer Greg Maxwell to further improve bitcoin's privacy.

Having been through a few so-called "Consensus" changes in his years as a bitcoin developer, Wuille gave a particularly long list of things to do.

Although changes are being made to bitcoin every day, with code contributions coming from a diverse group of contributors stationed around the world, Schnorr is a rarer type of change, since it affects the most important rules in bitcoin.

SegWit was the last code change "Consensus" change made to bitcoin, sparking a debate so big, those who disagreed with the change split off and created their own cryptocurrency with SegWit removed.