Bitcoin’s [BTC] Taproot, an upcoming upgrade would soon go live this weekend, ushering a new era in the crypto asset’s history. The latest soft fork will be initiated at block 709,632 enabling developers to deploy features that will work on strengthening the network’s overall infrastructure. Until now, more than half of known BTC nodes have offered support for the new upgrade. The remaining are currently operating on old software, which means they will not be able to implement the Taproot unless they have upgraded to Bitcoin Core 0.21.1. Nevertheless, the network would still work as its current version.
But, BTC miners running on the old program will not be able to mine successfully and earn rewards for any new block creation on the network. However, developers have worked on providing miners an opportunity to scale up their applications. As a matter of fact, over 90% of miners have already supported plans to upgrade to the new software, as indicated by Taproot’s ability to lock in, three months back.
It is important to note that a mere activation is not enough and that users will have to ensure that their individual Bitcoin wallets support the new feature. Until then, they won’t be able to send or receive any new kind of transaction. On the other hand, wallet developers will be required to write new codes in order to make such transactions a reality. If we look at history, Bitcoin’s last upgrade dubbed SegWit took approximately two years to attain a 50% adoption rate, which is why the wallet’s integration to the anticipated fork would take a while.
Bitcoin [BTC] Taproot and its proposed use cases
The proposed upgrade claims to provide developers in building new features that would enhance the network’s three most important issues namely privacy, security, and scalability. According to Katherine Dowling, Chief Exec of Bitwise Asset Management, Taproot will have Schnorr signatures, that will enable users to deploy more complex smart contracts on the blockchain. These signatures will also provide the scope for multi-signature transactions, to look like a single standard transaction thus ensuring privacy and anonymity.
Furthermore, this digital signature would also reduce the amount of data required for such multi-signature transactions.