An old debate is resurfacing in the bitcoin developer community, underscoring one of the critical challenges facing decentralized systems: how to update the software when ostensibly no one's in charge. The catalyst this time is called Taproot/Schnorr, a years-in-the-making privacy and scaling upgrade that's seen exciting progress recently, especially now that the code in the form of a "pull request" is being reviewed and tested, bringing a change first discussed years ago closer to reality. The code change itself isn't controversial among developers so far. What is up for discussion is the best way to activate ... (full story)