Taproot, the most significant improvement to Bitcoin’s protocol in
years, now has enough mining support to lock in activation.
According to the parameters set forward by “Speedy Trial,” if at least
90% of the blocks mined in any of the designated 2-week difficulty periods
“signal” their support for the upgrade, then the activation process can begin.
To be more precise: 1,815 out of 2,016 blocks mined within a period have to
include a little piece of encoded information that indicates that the miner who
mined that block is in favor of the upgrade.
During this second difficulty period, at block 687284, that benchmark
was met. By the time that the difficulty period ends on Sunday, it is likely
that Taproot will have locked in with over 99% of blocks signalling decisively
in its favor.
Speedy Trial and the long road to consensus
Taproot is Bitcoin’s most anticipated upgrade since Segregated Witness
(SegWit) in 2017. Whereas the main focus of SegWit was scaling the Bitcoin
protocol, Taproot will outfit Bitcoin with a new signature scheme known as
Schnorr signatures. This small adjustment to the Bitcoin code opens up new
possibilities for privacy, multisignature wallets and security, as well as
scaling.
Now that the threshold has been met, the end of this difficulty period
on Sunday will mark the completion of the first phase of Speedy Trial.
Speedy Trial is the process that the Bitcoin community of developers and
stakeholders agreed to use to determine if there was enough support from the
miners to go ahead with the Taproot soft fork. For months, even once it was
clear that there was widespread support for the upgrade, there was still debate
as to how it would be implemented.
Any alteration to Bitcoin’s code require consensus; there is no one
person or entity “in charge” that can unilaterally make those changes. Arriving
at that consensus can sometimes be even more complicated than writing the code itself.
In the case of Taproot, Speedy Trial, devised by David Harding and Russell
O’Connor, was the solution that got the most community support.
The next step toward Taproot activation
Now that the Taproot soft fork upgrades are “locked in,” the next phase
of activation is basically a 5-month waiting period. During this time, miners
and nodes will have ample opportunity to update their software to Bitcoin Core
0.21.1, the newest version of Bitcoin Core that contains activation logic for
the Taproot soft fork (and some other improvements).
Finally, in November, when Bitcoin reaches a specified “block height”
(Bitcoin block 709,632), Taproot will activate; that is, the Bitcoin
Improvement Proposals (BIPs) relevant to Taproot and contained in Bitcoin Core
0.21.1, will automatically kick in. At that point, all upgraded nodes and
devices will be able to recognize and accept transactions made using that
upgraded protocol.
After activation: What happens next?
From there, it will be up to developers in the Bitcoin ecosystem to make
use of the tools that Taproot brings to the table, specifically Schnorr
signatures which will replace Bitcoin’s current elliptic curve digital
signature algorithm (ECDSA).
These smaller and faster Schnorr signatures also have the added benefit
of being “linear,” a combination that will boost Bitcoin’s transaction privacy
and allow for more lightweight and complex “smart contracts” (an encoded
contract with self-executing rules).
In the long run, Taproot’s tooling and coding improvements will
translate to a better user experience for bitcoiners in terms of overall
performance, as well as privacy improvements to multisignature (multisig)
technology, privacy software and even scaling tech like the Lightning Network.
Source: Coindesk
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