Company
Date Published
Author
Chainlink
Word count
961
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Schnorr signatures, introduced as part of the Taproot upgrade in Bitcoin, offer several advantages over the previously used Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), including higher efficiency, increased privacy, and enhanced security. By enabling key aggregation, Schnorr allows multiple signatures to be combined into a single signature, reducing transaction fees and improving scalability without compromising on security features. This upgrade enhances privacy by making multisignature transactions indistinguishable from single-signature transactions on the blockchain. The non-malleability feature of Schnorr prevents attackers from altering valid signatures to authenticate different messages, which is crucial for cryptocurrency applications. Implemented in BIP-340, Schnorr signatures were activated in 2021 as part of the Taproot soft fork, bringing significant improvements to Bitcoin’s transaction processing and unlocking new scripting capabilities while remaining backward-compatible with Bitcoin's existing cryptographic algorithms.