Bitcoin's technical background is advancing rapidly, powerhouse of innovation, creativity and research.
Just a short list provided by Rusty Russell - programmer at Blockstream - what is coming.
"Blockstream is the leading provider of blockchain technologies, on the forefront of work in cryptography and distributed systems. From fraud to counterfeiting, from security to confidentiality, from accountability to transparency, our mission is to solve problems that undermine trust in today's financial systems."
- MAST - stands for merkleized abstract syntax trees
- Taproot
- Key aggregation
- Signature aggregation
- Batch signature validation
- Scriptless scripts
- Simplicity
- Covenants
- Confidential transactions
- Bulletproofs
- Client-side validation
- UTXO commitments
- UTXO proofs
- TXO commitments
- Fraud proofs
- TXO bitfields
- Rolling UTXO set hashes
- Transaction compression
- Set reconciliation for transaction relay
- Block template delta compression
- Dandelion
- Neutrino: Client-side block filtering (bip157/bip158)
- NODE_NETWORK_LIMITED (bip159)
- Peer encryption and peer authentication (bip150/bip151)
For details go to : http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/2018-01-24-rusty-russell-future-bitcoin-tech-directions/