TL;DR Breakdown
- Bitcoin’s (BTC) long-awaited Taproot upgrade has gone live.
- The advancement has excited crypto lovers who see it heralding a new era of BTC dominance.
Taproot, BTC’s long-awaited upgrade, is up and running. The upgrade went live on the network’s block 709632.
Analysts hold that Taproot is the most comprehensive BTC upgrade to date. It comes four years after the last that the network had. And its deployment has the BTC community buzzing.
Unlike its 2017 predecessor, the SegWit upgrade, Taproot has had a smooth rollout. The BTC community is in consensus that it’s a long-overdue enhancement.
The network has been struggling to match emerging BC projects. These have tended to offer users better transaction experiences. Therefore this upgrade aims at regaining BTC’s clout as a top-tier BTC.
Following the upgrade, BTC lovers have taken to social media in celebration. Many posted on Twitter screenshots of their countdowns towards block 709632. All the while expressing optimism at the impending upgrade.
And when Twitter chief Jack Dorsey tweeted the magic number, many broke out in celebration. They congratulated the network’s developers for attaining the feat.
A new dawn for BTC?
Many see the upgrade as heralding the dawn of a new and promising future for BTC. Others posted images of their first transactions on the activation block.
Why is there excitement about this fork? Well, Taproot brings to BTC many of the features that users have been clamoring for.
Stillmark’s Alyse Killen explains the import of the upgrade better. She opines that Taproot expands opportunities for entrepreneurs. That’s because it allows for the upscaling of BTC’s usage.
Through the upgrade, users can look forward to faster transactions. Additionally, they’ll have more privacy and pay less for their transactions.
One key feature that the upgrade introduces is the Schnorr signatures. This feature makes it hard to read multi-signature (multi-sig) transactions.
No, Schnorr Signatures won’t increase your anonymity of the BC. But they’ll increase the difficulty of telling simple transactions apart from complex ones.
In turn, that enhances your privacy. That’s because you’ll expose your private keys less on the BC. As such, you can “hide” your identity a tad better, as Meow’s Brandon Arvanaghi puts it.
Taproot and smart contracts
Besides Schnorr, the upgrade also introduces smart contracts. These instruments are an integral part of the Ethereum network. They’re also the mainstay of the Decentralized finance (Defi) sector.
Smart contracts enable peer-to-peer transactions. You can use them for any type of exchange. Since they eliminate third parties from engagements, they help speed up transactions while lowering their fees.
In addition to easing transactions, the smart contracts occupy very little space on the BC. It’s these features that Killeen insists make the contracts open the BTC network to immense possibilities. And Marathon Digital Holdings‘ Fred Thiel concurs that they’re Taproot’s most crucial feature.
The enhancement could see BTC take a prominent role in the Defi sector. The premier crypto could use its broad appeal to unseat Ethereum as the go-to platform for DeFi products.
The upgrade has been a long time coming. It has been in the works since June, when the BTC community agreed on its adoption. But it is coming to fruition now.
Quantum Economics’ Jason Dean explains that the delay was to allow for thorough testing. He says such upgrades make allowances for bugging. Thus to increase user confidence, there’s a need for testing and retesting.
Again the delay wanted to avert possible falling out of the community. That happened in 2013 after an upgrade that went awry split the community into two. The split was, however, temporary.
