Bitcoin and Blockchain speaker Sam Wouters has outlined how Schnorr signatures could help prevent spam attacks on the Bitcoin network.
In a Medium post published today, Wouters heralds Schnorr signatures - which reduces the amount of block space taken up by multi-output transactions - as a way to lessen mempool bloat.
“If we only have one signature per transaction, a spammer would need to send far more transactions and thus spend more money to take up the same transaction space,” he explained.
Bitcoin’s recent huge backlog of unconfirmed transactions was the result of multiple transactions with “many sources,” Wouters continued, which added to the Blockchain’s bulk.
Schnorr signatures would take away the added size caused by multi-signature transactions, saving space and therefore money.
The effect would also be hidden, making multi-signature transactions look like single-signature ones.
“At the end of the day, if it is just one person sending that transaction from multiple sources, there should be some way to do so with just one signature, right? This is what Schnorr signatures allow us to do,” Wouters adds.
The spam element meanwhile suggests that before Barry Silbert’s New York scaling agreement, actors were deliberately slowing the network down with high fees and delays to force a block size increase, the post says.