Taproot, one of the most awaited Bitcoin (BTC) upgrades and its most significant revision since 2017, supposed to improve privacy, scalability, flexibility, and speed of the network – may be happening in months.
Bitcoin missionary and strategist at crypto exchange Kraken, Pierre Rochard, advised that the next year is the one to look forward to for all those waiting to see this protocol upgrade.
According to taprootactivation.com and the corresponding GitHub document, ten of the twelve contacted Bitcoin mining pools have indicated Taproot support, comprising Poolin, BTC.com, F2Pool, and others. SigmaPool is uncertain, and there is “no answer” from the Binance Pool. Total hashrate (1-month average) in support of Taproot is 82.05%, states the website.
As earlier announced, per the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) shared by developer Pieter Wuille, Taproot is a code change intended to increase the privacy of the world’s number one coin making all transactions on the blockchain look the same to outsiders. For this reason, Taproot would also hide Bitcoin users’ high-level payments so that any complex payment would seem like any other, conventional payment.
This code will be packaged with an enhancement called Schnorr, a soft fork that developers have been achieving on for a long time, enhancing privacy, scalability, and speed. It allows signature data to be merged, thus encoding multiple keys into a single one.
Wuille submitted a “pull request” concerning Schnorr/Taproot in January this year, letting others know that a code change is ready for reviews, discussions, suggestions, etc. In October, Taproots code was merged into Bitcoin core, included in Bitcoin Core’s coding library, waiting for the node operators to adopt the new ruleset and then for the upgrade to be activated.
Meantime, Bitcoin researcher at major blockchain technology firm Blockstream, Jonas Nick, tweeted a timeline of the Taproot development so far, disputing that the time it took up until this point is “appropriate.”
Developer Stepan Snigirev recently announced that,
“I think the main topic and development focus in 2021 will be Schnorr and Taproot adoption that is coming to Bitcoin. This will mean a lot of benefits and also a lot of work for software and hardware wallet companies.”
Snigirev continued that adopting these two upgrades would facilitate several other technology innovations for Bitcoin, such as Lightning, Multisig, and MuSig – with the latter two being embedded in Taproot.
Meanwhile, per a Twitter thread by ‘Sebastian,’ there is a “very small short term negative effect [of Taproot which] is well known,” but the improvements “down the road more than outweigh it.”
He argues that long term, Taproot benefits Bitcoin’s privacy and makes Layer 2 protocols (any protocol built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain) more efficient, thus further improving scalability.
This was a reply to a report on the negative impact of Taproot on Bitcoin’s privacy by the lead developer at block explorer and crypto portfolio tracker Blockchair, Nikita Zhavoronkov.
Among the claims, the report stated an increasing reduction in the privacy level with the utilization of multisig P2SH addresses and SegWit. Adding another standard address format (P2TR) would make it even worse, he claims.
At pixel time (18:22 UTC), BTC trades at USD 19,089 and is almost unchanged in a day. The price slipped by nearly 1% in a week. It rallied by 26% in a month and 153% in a year.
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