In Brief:
- Taproot is the first major bitcoin upgrade since 2017.
- The Bitcoin Taproot got activated at block 709,632.
- The update targets improvement of network privacy and security.
The Bitcoin network just created history by activating its most remarkable Taproot soft fork upgrade after 4 years. Taproot went live at block 709,632 mined by F2Pool.
The Taproot is the major upgrade in four years, following the July 2017 upgrade of Bitcoin’s network to segregated Witness, or “SegWit.”
Taproot is a Bitcoin softfork that will improve scalability and privacy. The softfork achieves this by substituting Schnorr signatures for Bitcoin’s current signature protocol.
Schnorr is the faster signature that improves the privacy of Bitcoin transactions. It will make multi-signature transactions cheaper and simpler to execute.
It will render simple transactions indistinguishable and will generate a sort of master key to summarise a collection of signatures into a single one, hence upgrading privacy and security.
Taproot also enables Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree(MAST), which aids in making smart contracts more efficient and private by disclosing only the key sections of the contract when spending. MAST gives a markelizd hash of the information.
The bitcoin community agreed to lock in the Taproot upgrade in June, however its launch did not occur until November.
Miners given a five-month wait period to update their software to the most recent version of Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Core 0.21.1.
The wait period is utilized for testing and reducing the possibility of something going wrong during the upgrade.
Hopefully, the Taproot upgrade will show its full potential soon with the bitcoin community and developers exploring the new features it offers.
