BCH will hard fork again in May. Will it cause disputes and shake the cryptocurrency market again?

Last week, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developers discussed the features that need to be added for the 5-year network upgrade this year. The results of the discussion showed that this upgrade will add two new features: Schnorr signatures and Segwit recovery. Developers said that features such as nullfail (Nullfail is the same as OP_CHECKSIG execution, if the signature does not match the provided public key and message hash, and the signature is not an empty byte array, the entire script will fail) and 100-byte transaction size will not appear in the hard fork in May.

BCH enters the preparation stage for a new round of hard fork

On Valentine’s Day, cryptocurrency developers Mark Lundeberg, Antony Zegers, Amaury Séchet, Jason B. Cox, Andrea Suisani, and Matias Garcia joined conference host David Allen to discuss the May upgrade, which the developers revealed will add two important features.

The May upgrade will include Schnorr signatures and segregated witness recovery. Features such as nullfail, minimal data push, and modifying the 100-byte transaction limit will not appear in this upgrade.

Developers also discussed testing and planning for the upgrade prior to the hard fork, including setting up a public source for shared information, deciding on common parameters, and testing plans for the concept of persistent nodes for mining pools.

Developer Jason B. Cox said:

Over the past few months, we have looked at a lot of possible additions to the May hard fork - only some of them seem to be ready for this upgrade, such as Schnorr. This feature seems to be in good shape and has been through several code reviews. Segregated witness resiliency is another upgrade that could be added.

Bitcoin ABC lead developer Amaury Séchet agreed:

Yeah, I don't think there's much else that can be added, Schnorr can be made functional with a patch.

Mark Lundeberg further explained the Segregated Witness recovery function, which is less known than Schnorr signatures. At present, the BCH code base has added relevant pages and codes. In simple terms, suppose a BCH is sent to a Segregated Witness address. Due to the cleanup stack rule, this BCH cannot be received through the BCH link. After adding the Segregated Witness recovery function, this rule will not include the Segregated Witness address, and the BCH sent by mistake can be retrieved.

Schnorr signature first entered into the BCH chain

Currently, both new features have been “frozen” in the BCH protocol, and developers can test them on the test network. In general, BCH developers are confident in the deployment of these two features, and it seems that the deployment of Schnorr signatures can be ahead of Bitcoin developers.

Currently, Bitcoin Core developers are also studying Schnorr signatures. Blockstream has just announced a multi-signature transaction standard MU-Sig. This protocol can help the deployment of Schnorr.

Mark Lundeberg said that he also understands the MU-Sig protocol and believes that BCH can also use this protocol because it belongs to the wallet side; the node only needs to continue to verify the Schnorr signature normally.