Miners have activated a major upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol. On Saturday afternoon, they finally locked in the requisite number of blocks to lock in the Taproot upgrade, a protocol that obscures complicated transactions and lowers transaction fees.
As it stands, pre-Taproot, complex Bitcoin transactions add a lot of code to the ledger and are easily identifiable. This makes it easier to track the flow of money, unnecessarily bulks out the blockchain and hikes up transaction fees. Not ideal for a privacy-focused payments network that’s short on space.
Taproot mushes complex transactions together with simple ones, making it difficult to identify the provenance of specific transactions while scrimping on data. This also lowers transaction costs for complicated transactions.
To implement the upgrade, 90% of mined blocks during a two-week window must contain a “signal” that they support the upgrade. Today, the network hit that threshold. Taproot will now go live in November.
What Is Taproot? The Privacy-Focused Bitcoin Upgrade.
What is Taproot? It's not a carrot or a turnip, but a Bitcoin update that promises to keep some transaction details buried deep in the metaphorical soil. Taproot, which went live in November 2021, was the biggest Bitcoin upgrade since 2017. That upgrade led to a hard fork of the network—splitting the Bitcoin blockchain in two. Though Taproot wasn't quite as contentious, it's worth understanding how it altered the world's biggest blockchain network. What was addressed? The Bitcoin blockchain is...
The upgrade, proposed in 2018 by Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell, is widely considered to be one of the most important upgrades to the Bitcoin blockchain in several years. The last major upgrade was the Segregated Witness (SegWit) upgrade in 2017, which removed some transaction data to allow blocks to handle more transactions.
