Bitcoin Taproot Upgrade Gets Finally Locked in

The first Bitcoin upgrade in four years known as Taproot has just been approved by miners around the world and it’s due to take effect in November. The latest upgrade opens up new possibilities for the Bitcoin network in terms of privacy, multisignature wallets, security, and scaling.

Bitcoin Taproot Upgrade Finally Locked In

As noted by Taproot.Watch which had been tracking the weekly efforts to secure activation support among Bitcoin’s mining sector, the taproot upgrade gets finally locked in.

Now the next phase of activation is a 5-month waiting period where miners and nodes will have the opportunity to update their software to Bitcoin Core 0.21.1, the newest version of Bitcoin Core that contains an activation kit for the Taproot soft fork.

The full activation of Taproot is set for network block 709,632, expected to occur sometime in mid-November.

Taproot is expected to be implemented along with another upgrade called Schnorr signatures that will bring significant improvements in terms of privacy, scalability, security, and more.

These smaller and faster Schnorr signatures will also have the added benefit of being “linear,” a combination that will boost Bitcoin’s transaction, privacy and allow for more room to process complex smart contracts.

Greater Privacy, Security, Scalability of the Bitcoin Network

Currently, the cryptocurrency uses something called the “Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm,” created from the private key which controls a Bitcoin wallet and ensures that Bitcoin can only be spent by the rightful owner.

Without Taproot, anyone can detect transactions on Bitcoin using complex features such as timelock or multi-signature. With Taproot’s upgrade, it will be possible to make transactions private as they will appear like a single transaction.

In fact, Taproot makes it possible to hide that a Bitcoin script ran at all. For example, anyone monitoring one of these transactions would see nothing but a peer-to-peer transaction. However, wallets of the initial sender and final recipient will still be exposed.