From 94e9c0925a3e132581f6cb6d44923ce3dc540b45 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Pieter Wuille <pieter.wuille@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2019 16:28:58 -0800
Subject: Add an informal summary of the design

---
 bip-taproot.mediawiki | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

(limited to 'bip-taproot.mediawiki')

diff --git a/bip-taproot.mediawiki b/bip-taproot.mediawiki
index 6d49b87..f436497 100644
--- a/bip-taproot.mediawiki
+++ b/bip-taproot.mediawiki
@@ -41,6 +41,7 @@ As a result we choose this combination of technologies:
 * While the core semantics of the '''signature hashing algorithm''' are not changed, a number of improvements are included in this proposal. The new signature hashing algorithm fixes the verification capabilities of offline signing devices by including amount and scriptPubKey in the digest, avoids unnecessary hashing, uses '''tagged hashes''' and defines a default sighash byte.
 * The '''public key is directly included in the output''' in contrast to typical earlier constructions which store a hash of the public key or script in the output. This has the same cost for senders and is more space efficient overall if the key-based spending path is taken. <ref>'''Why is the public key directly included in the output?''' While typical earlier constructions store a hash of a script or a public key in the output, this is rather wasteful when a public key is always involved. To guarantee batch verifiability, the public key must be known to every verifier, and thus only revealing its hash as an output would imply adding an additional 32 bytes to the witness. Furthermore, to maintain [https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-January/012198.html 128-bit collision security] for outputs, a 256-bit hash would be required anyway, which is comparable in size (and thus in cost for senders) to revealing the public key directly. While the usage of public key hashes is often said to protect against ECDLP breaks or quantum computers, this protection is very weak at best: transactions are not protected while being confirmed, and a very [https://twitter.com/pwuille/status/1108097835365339136 large portion] of the currency's supply is not under such protection regardless. Actual resistance to such systems can be introduced by relying on different cryptographic assumptions, but this proposal focuses on improvements that do not change the security model.</ref>
 
+Informally, the resulting design is as follows. A new witness version is added (1), whose programs consist of 32-byte encodings of points ''Q''. ''Q'' is computed as ''P + hash(P||m)G'' for a public key ''P'', and the root ''m'' of a Merkle tree whose leaves consist of a version number and a script. These outputs can be spent directly by providing a signature for ''Q'', or indirectly by revealing ''P'', the script and leaf version, inputs that satisfy the script, and a Merkle path that proves ''Q'' committed to that leaf. All hashes in this construction (the hash for computing ''Q'' from ''P'', the hashes inside the Merkle tree's inner nodes, and the signature hashes used) are tagged to guarantee domain separation.
 
 == Specification ==
 
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cgit v1.2.3

