ECDSA has been the preferred signature algorithm for most blockchain networks for verifying ownership and transfer of assets on the networks. However, this complex scheme that has been used in Bitcoin since 2008 started to show its limits. For example difficulties in producing multisignatures and added complexity in second layer Bitcoin networks like Lightning and crhoss-chain atomic swaps. Last year, a proposal called MuSig, or MultiSignature Scheme, was made. It offers many improvements over ECDSA and is probably one the most important cryptographic improvements to Bitcoin that would help increase privacy and efficiency in transactions.

Andrew Poelstra, one of the key researchers and co-author of the paper published a technical overview on this upcoming cryptographic scheme and its applications.

• Read the full article here

We’ve been taking a break for the past two months while working on a website upgrade. Since we did not cover news in that time, we decided to make a series of recap articles covering the last two months, starting with news related Bitcoin Core and going through Lightning Network and its related updates.

There was a discussion on BIP39 seeds and the probability of getting a valid BIP39 using randomly chosen words, otherwise known as brute forcing. The probability is about 1:256 for 24 words and 1:16 for 12 words. This is meant to change drastically with SLIP 39, proposed last year, SLIP 39 describes a standard implementation of Shamir’s secret-sharing, which splits a secret into unique parts which can be distributed among participants.