Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade gets approval from crypto miners; to improve transaction privacy, efficiency

Bitcoin’s latest upgrade – four years after the “last civil war” upgrade – known as Taproot has now been approved by the crypto miners across the world and is set to take effect in November this year, CNBC reported. The new upgrade will mean higher efficiency and privacy in transactions and will also unlock the potential of a key feature of its blockchain technology – smart contracts – that removes middlemen from transactions including the most complex ones.

Taproot intends to change the way in which the scripts operate in Bitcoin for making the blockchain’s privacy, scalability and security better and is designed to achieve by furnishing Bitcoin with a signature scheme called Schnorr signatures, according to CoinMarketCap. Schnorr Signatures were developed by German mathematician and cryptographer Claus-Peter Schnorr. The signatures provide an advantage — they can take multiple keys within a complex Bitcoin transaction and produce a single signature.

Currently, without Taproot, anyone can detect transactions on Bitcoin using complex features including timelock or multi-signature. Post Taproot upgrade of Bitcoin blockchain with the Taproof implementation, it will be possible to make transactions private as they will appear like a single transaction, thereby enhancing Bitcoin’s privacy.

Also read: Indians earned only $241 million from Bitcoin in 2020 while Americans made over $4B, Chinese more than $1B

The time till November will involve a lot of testing that will reduce the chances of something going wrong during an upgrade. “Upgrades allow the – extremely remote – possibility of a bug entering the system, which would destroy confidence in the whole cryptocurrency system, effectively wiping it out – a ‘self-inflicted wound’ if you like,” CNBC cited Jason Deane, an analyst at Quantum Economics. That’s the reason why upgrade processes are so carefully tested, retested, and vetted, again and again, over very long periods of time, prior to being deployed, said Deane.

The development comes amid Bitcoin’s increasing mainstream adoption as a digital currency. The crypto was recently adopted as a legal tender by the Central American nation El Salvador which had passed its Bitcoin Law to legalise Bitcoin as the currency alongside the US dollar.