Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Taproot: Privacy preserving switchable scripting

From: Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2018 21:38:13 +0000

On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 9:23 PM, Matt Corallo via bitcoin-dev
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> The issue with that approach without support for the privacy-encouraging
> wrapper proposed by Greg here is that it encourages adoption halfway and
> destroys a lot of the value of the apparent-script monoculture for privacy
> preservation. Greg's proposal here doesn't change the format of any specific
> MAST implementation, but instead adds the privacy wrapper that I always felt
> was missing in existing proposals, without any real additional overhead in
> many use-cases!
>
> Indeed, permissionless innovation is important, but the huge advantage of
> providing the privacy wrapper by default here is absolutely massive to the
> ecosystem and should not be handwaved away for vague possibly-advantages.

Even if to someone who didn't care about anyone's privacy at all,
non-taproot is simply inefficient.  In the (I argue) overwhelmingly
common case of everyone-agrees simple hash based branching requires a
30% overhead to communicate the commitment to the untaken branch (and
worse in the case of extensive aggregation).  I don't think an
argument can be sustained in favor of that kind of communications
overhead.