Benchmarking Bitcoin Script Evaluation for the Varops Budget (Great Script Restoration)

In recent explorations into the efficiency of cryptographic operations within the Bitcoin network, particularly those involving Schnorr signatures, a noteworthy experiment was conducted using nanobench to measure the execution time of the pubkey.VerifySchnorr(sighash, sig) function. This test, performed 80,000 times on a modern CPU, revealed that it takes between one and two seconds to complete. This finding raises concerns about the current benchmarking practices, which may inadvertently set the worst-case scenario as the new average for transaction verification times.

The implications of this discovery are significant for the Bitcoin ecosystem, especially considering the potential shift in how transactions are verified. The concern is not just about the increased time for verifying a single transaction but how this might affect the overall cost of verification per block. If every block approaches the level of verification cost observed in the test, this could have profound effects on Initial Block Download (IBD) times or the responsiveness of the network during periods of high transaction volume in turbulent mempools.

There is an ongoing debate about what would constitute an acceptable verification time, with some suggesting that aiming for an order of magnitude faster, around 100 milliseconds, might be more appropriate. However, predicting the future landscape of Bitcoin's transaction verification is challenging. It remains to be seen whether the average block will indeed require more intensive verification processes akin to those tested or if the system will lean towards optimizing for speed and efficiency, potentially making heavy use of signatures less common. This discussion also opens up further inquiry into the practical utility of increasing signature operations versus their computational cost and impact on network performance.