The major bitcoin update in recent years, Taproot has received the necessary miner support to activate in November.
According to the Speedy Trial method chosen for the upgrade, at least 90% of the blocks mined within one two-week period of difficulty, or 1,815 out of 2,016, had to contain the corresponding miner tag to start the activation process. The current difficulty period ended on Sunday and 98% of the blocks include the required signal.
Taproot has been the most anticipated bitcoin update since Segregated Witness (SegWit) was activated in 2017. The previous upgrade was aimed at increasing scalability, while Taproot will bring a new signature scheme to Bitcoin – Schnorr signatures. This small change opens up opportunities for increased privacy, a variety of multisig wallets, and additional scalability benefits. Many cryptographers consider the Schnorr signature scheme to be one of the best among its kind, since its mathematical properties provide a high level of accuracy, and transactions in it are protected from plasticity and are quickly verified. The “linear mathematics” of Schnorr signatures will allow the launch of a new type of smart contracts based on bitcoin to define various conditions for the execution of transactions.
Thus, users will be able to combine several conditions in one transaction. In many ways, this is already possible in Bitcoin, but with Taproot there will be additional advantages, for example, transactions of multi-signature wallets at the blockchain level will be indistinguishable from ordinary ones. This approach is considered to be more effective, since the owners of multi-signature wallets will not have to disclose all the conditions for the execution of transactions, as a result of which privacy will increase. In the long term, Taproot will lead to a better user experience.
In the past, Bitcoin has had certain difficulties activating updates. For example, miners objected to SegWit, which led to the introduction of a method for activating a soft fork by USAF users. Only after that did large groups of opposing miners agree to join them. Unlike SegWit, Taproot does not contain features that would annoy miners, so they approved it quickly enough. The Speedy Trial proved to be a compromise, and today’s approval of the update was a confirmation of the method’s viability.
Now miners and network nodes will be given five months to upgrade to the current version of the Bitcoin Core 0.21.1 client, which contains the logic for activating the soft fork. At block 709 632, which is expected to be added to the Bitcoin network in November, the update will be directly activated. Then the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIP) included in Taproot will automatically begin to be used by network participants who have installed the necessary update, and the nodes will be able to recognize and process transactions with new capabilities.
Taproot was proposed by Blockstream CTO Gregory Maxwell and prepared by Bitcoin Core developers including Peter Wülle, Anthony Townes, Johnson Lau, Jonas Nick, Andrew Poelstra, Tim Ruffing, Rusty Russell and Maxwell himself. Taproot is a backward compatible update, which means that even nodes using older versions of Bitcoin Core will remain online after launch, but won’t have access to new features. Ultimately, it is up to the users to decide whether to take advantage of Taproot or stick with the old patterns.
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