Taproot Goes Live, Here’s All You Need To Know About Bitcoin’s Network Upgrade

The Bitcoin network has finally come with its new and highly anticipated protocol, Taproot. Going live on Sunday, this is Bitcoin’s first major upgrade since SegWit back in 2017.

Taproot Comes With Great New Features

According to reports, the Taproot upgrade has been a long time coming — about seven years precisely but was kick-started again on June 12, 2021. Since then however, the network put out a waiting period so that all nodes could upgrade to the newest version of Bitcoin Core during that time.

Without any doubt, Taproot is the most significant upgrade to the Bitcoin network since SegWit in 2017 as earlier mentioned. Going back to SegWit, it fixed several bugs and allowed more transactions to be embedded in each block while also serving as the foundation for Layer 2 payment channels like ‘Lightning’.

The New Features Revealed In Details

Meanwhile, even as today’s upgrade suggests mostly a backdoor kind of change, for now, Taproot protects privacy on the Bitcoin blockchain by concealing complicated transactions. It also makes them more lightweight and even cheaper.

Another benefit of this upgrade is that it has a way of combining both simple and complex transactions without necessarily maxing out the blockchain.

Now, one might ask how it’s able to do this. Well, simply by replacing the current signature protocol of Bitcoin with Schnorr signatures — which are relatively faster.  All of this now helps to bolster the transaction privacy of Bitcoin, making it a lot easier to implement lightweight smart contracts.

The implication of this for Bitcoin is that, now, multiple-signatories transactions can be allowed at once, making such transactions easier to carry out, and even way cheaper. In the same manner, putting Bitcoin’s finite space to better use will also make the blockchain more scalable.

But then, there’s the thing with most things on Bitcoin. This upgrade will amount to nothing, except, of course,  developers explore and build on Taproot, integrating new features that will boost privacy, scalability, security on the network.