This is a #比特币生态 series of articles, aiming at systematic learning and building a more complete knowledge system.
This article is the second one. The Bitcoin ecosystem is a narrative triggered by technology. SegWit and Taproot upgrades are the cornerstones of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Without these two upgrades, there would be no Ordinals and Inscriptions.
➤ Bitcoin Upgrade: SegWit
When Bitcoin was designed, it was stipulated that a block occupies 1M of space, and this size limits the amount of transactions that each block can accommodate.
Due to some historical or cultural reasons, modifying the block size could not be implemented, so developers started with transactions. In 2017, Bitcoin underwent an upgrade called Segregated Witness.
According to the structure of each transaction data, the data is divided into two parts: one is the basic transaction data, including input and output information. The input information points to the UTXO to be spent, and the output information specifies the recipient address and the newly generated UTXO; the other is the witness/signature data, which is used to verify the legitimacy of the transaction. Each input requires a signature to prove that the sender has the right to spend these bitcoins.
The witness data is separated from the transaction data, and a mark is used to point to the separate witness data, so as to reduce the space occupied by the transaction data. The maximum storage space for the witness data is 3M, which is also often said that the effective space has increased from 1M to 4M. This not only reduces the amount of data occupied by each transaction in the block, but also reduces the mining fee (about 35%), and also optimizes the speed of the Bitcoin chain.
The separation of witness data has added a lot of flexibility to Bitcoin. In fact, the conditions for the birth of inscriptions have been initially met, but it is only 2017 and the technology still needs further iteration.
➤ Bitcoin Upgrade: Taproot
After the Taproot upgrade in November 2021, Bitcoin's witness data can contain more complex scripts, although it is not as complex as Ethereum smart contracts. In addition, Taproot optimizes the use of block space, allowing witness data to better utilize unused transaction storage space, approaching the 4MB upper limit.
The Taproot upgrade also introduces a new transaction method called P2TR (Pay to Taproot). This method achieves higher privacy and flexibility by using a single public key or more complex scripts (such as multi-signature wallets or smart contracts). P2TR transactions utilize Merkle Abstract Syntax Tree (MAST) and Schnorr signature technology, allowing multiple spending conditions to be efficiently encoded in a single transaction.
With P2TR transactions, you can spend Bitcoin using either a key path or a script path, which makes all P2TR outputs look the same, improving privacy.
This is why when referring to a Bitcoin address it usually starts with bc1p or bc1q.
At this point, the basic technical soil for the Bitcoin ecosystem has already appeared, but it still takes more than a year for the Ordinals, the starting point of the Bitcoin ecosystem, to be born!
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