How does this differ from Taproot, which also held workshops? I actually didn't know about the workshops until after they happened, I never received a notice that they were occurring, otherwise I would have attended.
If you're referring to
https://bitcoinops.org/workshops/#taproot-workshop, please note those were private training sessions for Optech member companies (who all pay an annual fee in part so that we can produce training material for them). The workshops did not involve any of the primary contributors to taproot (
edit: this is incorrect: Pieter Wuille attended the SF workshop and Andrew Poelstra attended the NYC workshop) and did not involve any protocol development. Indeed, here are some quotes from Bryan Bishop's rough transcript of the New York session
https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/bitcoinops/schnorr-taproot-workshop-2019/notes/ :
Why Bitcoin Optech?
Why are we doing this? Why is Bitcoin Optech involved? We started Optech 18 months ago because we wanted to help bitcoin companies adopt scaling technologies. At the time that was batching and fee estimation, but we're also looking at what's coming along like Schnorr, Taproot, eltoo maybe. We're also helping to get Schnorr and Taproot reviewed and later implemented by services. So we want to help drive adoption of scaling tech to bitcoin.
Why this workshop?
Schnorr/taproot is still a few months or a year out. We still want to share the current thinking around Schnorr and taproot. Pieter and Andrew have been working very hard on this proposal. They want to share with people in the industry what the current thinking is, around taproot. We want to give you guys a chance to play with the technology, write code, and see what you can do with the technology. We also want you involved in the feedback process. Right now the proposal is going through community feedback right now, and we want you guys to be able to take part of that feedback process since you guys are the ones who will be implementing it out when this gets rolled out.
A few warnings
Schonrr/taproot is a proposal. It will change. In fact, it has changed. In our notebooks, we were using 33 byte public keys. But in the proposal, they have now switched to 32 byte public keys.
There is no roadmap. Nobody is in charge of bitcoin and says when we can make a consensus change. This stuff could be rolled out and implemented, it could be in 6 months or many years, we don't know. It probably won't be 1 month.
Also, all of the code you see today is only for educational purposes, please don't spend real money with our libraries. They are not secure.
I'm sorry if there was any confusion about these workshops somehow being official.