What is Taproot?

BIT4YOU.io
3 min readAug 19, 2021

Bitcoin is the world’s first and most well-known cryptocurrency. Then, thousands of altcoins appeared with their advantages over bitcoin. However, there were a few crucial upgrades that kept the community’s attention. So, ladies and gentlemen, Taproot is at your service. This article explains what Taproot upgrade is, when this technology will be implemented, and what blockchain aspects Taproot improves.

This article explains what Taproot upgrade is, when this technology will be implemented, and what blockchain aspects Taproot improves.

The main concept of Taproot belongs to Gregory Maxwell and was announced back in January 2018. This method presupposes improvement in both the scalability and privacy of bitcoin transactions. It includes several components and seeks to find a compromise between blockchain, which is a public data store, and users’ privacy needs. According to this, Taproot decreases the commission by 30–75%, and the time required to add a block is reduced by 2.5 times. In general, Taproot is organized similarly to a Merkle tree, which is a tree-like binary system with hashes in the crown and total values in the root. At the same time, Taproot supports such technology as “collaborative spending,” which means that all participants in a transaction can be brought in to reach an agreement.

The Schnorr signature

Moreover, the scheme of Schnorr signatures is in charge of the efficiency of transactions in the update. The Schnorr scheme, often known as the Schnorr signature, increases network capacity by aggregating the signatures required for a Bitcoin transaction. In its turn, signatures are a technique of verifying that the user genuinely possesses the private keys linked with the BTC address and may thus spend their funds properly. The technology improves the efficiency of blockchain space using while also lowering commission expenses. The most well-known benefit in the Bitcoin context is that Schnorr’s linear mathematics enables signature aggregation: several signatures can be integrated into one. In addition, this technique is quite useful with multi-signature transactions. In this way, by combining public keys and signatures into threshold public keys and threshold signatures, multi-signature transactions can be rendered indistinguishable from ordinary transactions.

Taproot and SegWit

Nevertheless, apart from the essence of the update, the fundamental distinction between Taproot and SegWit is the cryptocurrency community’s unity. Unlike in 2017, when conflicts resulted in the emergence of Bitcoin Cash, almost everyone favored the Taproot update. On the other hand, some believe that the update will, on the contrary, promote centralization. Despite this, Schnorr and Taproot signatures with Tapscript improve scalability and privacy by disguising scripts and keys. They also reduce the capacity of third parties to detect the types of transactions that occur. These enhancements have the potential to greatly increase the acceptability, security, and safety of transactions. Bitcoin developers and the community intend to incorporate Taproot and Schnorr signatures into core code in the future to make BTC more convenient and user-friendly.

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Valentina BEREZA, Team bit4you

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