Habemus Taproot! Most anticipated Bitcoin update activated

Taproot is the most anticipated update to Bitcoin in recent years, and it finally took effect in the protocol during the early hours of Sunday, November 14, at the peak of block 709632. The block was mined by F2pool and contains the message gm taproot, Or good morning roots.

From now on, Bitcoin has better tools to do More transactions Spreadlower efficiency expensive And also to make your smart contracts more flexible and advanced.

Since it was proposed in 2018, Taproot has gone through a long path of development and discussion, including a consultation period led by miners, who Show their support This update was last June 2021.

Taproot is an update summarized in three proposals to improve Bitcoin or BIP: Taproot (BIP 341), Schnorr (BIP 340), and Tapscript (BIP 342).

These proposals come together to do several important things:

• Optimize the language (script) for Bitcoin (BTC) spending instructions, To make it easier and compatible with updates Bitcoin may have over time.
• It introduces Schnorr’s cipher signature creation algorithm, which allows Create, manage and integrate user signatures In a lighter way, which greatly benefits users of wallets and multi-signature transactions, for example.
• Taproot introduces a new structure for organizing Bitcoin transaction information, the Merkle Tree of Alternative Syntax, or MAST, whose main benefit is Hide the spend instructions included in the transaction, it only shows the data that was last used, so we don’t have to add data we don’t use to the Bitcoin blockchain.

We’ve been talking about these benefits on CriptoNoticias all the time Our coverage about Taproot, which highlights that many projects are already experimenting with this update, waiting for its final activation in the main network of Bitcoin.

For now, we’ll pay attention to the updates they make Payment serversAnd exchangesAnd governor and other ecosystem services regarding Taproot.

Although Taproot brings significant changes to Bitcoin, it is not a file hard fork of Bitcoin, so it will still be compatible with older versions of the Bitcoin Core client. At the time of publication, 54.64% of the network had updated their node.

The only difference is that If your node is out of date For the Bitcoin Core 0.22 client, You will not be able to receive or re-transfer transactions from Taproot, but you will undoubtedly get to know the blocks created by miners including this type of transaction.