Taproot Upgrade Goes Live On The Bitcoin Network

This comes after 'lock-in' last June, which saw over 95% of validators upvoting the software upgrade BIP341/342 known as Taproot. The Bitcoin improvement protocol was activated on the network at Block 709,632 on Sunday, November 14, at epoch 0515 UTC.

Taproot enables MAST, a feature that will enhance efficiency and privacy when performing smart contracts on the blockchain by only disclosing the most relevant parts of the contract when spending. This replaces previous Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) with a more secure signature known as Schnorr.

When Bitcoin was created as a permissionless and open system, the ECDSA was elected as its security signature scheme because of its properties, such as being lightweight, open-source and secure.

With ECDSA, users were able to choose and generate signatures from their private keys as well as easily calculate their public key. But with Schnorr, users will be able to make their transactions more secure as this node aims at making multi-signature transactions unreadable, fast and cheaper.

The multi-signature transactions will also make the implementation of smart contracts on the Bitcoin network itself possible. Although developers can already deploy smart contracts on Lightning Network, a payment platform built on the Bitcoin blockchain enabling users to perform instant transactions.

Taproot which saw a rare consensus among users, is the most significant upgrade on the Bitcoin network since 2017’s SegWit upgrade fondly called the “Last Civil War.”

Bitcoin network runs on a set of consensus verification rules which covers syntax, data structures, resource usage limits, sanity checks, time locking, reconciliation with the memory pool and main branch, the coinbase reward and fee calculation, and block header verification. No proposed upgrade can successfully be implemented in the node software without a 95% network-wide consensus.

Taproot was originally proposed by Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell in January 2018, a proposal designed to upgrade the Bitcoin network with privacy-preserving switchable scripting.