Bitcoin advocates are celebrating the successful implementation of the Taproot upgrade after block height 709,632. The upgrade was eagerly awaited as it was one of the most significant changes since the introduction of Segregated Witness (Segwit) in 2017. After the upgrade was completed, the Bitcoin community discussed the slew of benefits Taproot and Schnorr signatures have to offer and have started measuring Taproot usage as well.
Taproot has been activated on the Bitcoin blockchain
At 12:15 a.m. (EST) at block height 709,632, at difficulty period 352, Taproot was officially activated on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain. The upgrade was long-awaited as it’s an improvement that’s taken seven years to complete.
Taproot allows users to use Bitcoin scripts in multiple ways to improve privacy, scalability, and security. Combining Taproot with an improvement called Schnorr signatures allows for more compact transactions and key aggregation, which provides a multi-faceted array of multi-signature transaction schemes. Schnorr offers three major benefits according to the codebase introduction on Github:
- Provenable security: Schnorr signatures are provable. In more detail, they are highly tamper-proof in the context of a chosen message attack (SUF-CMA).
- Non-malleability: The SUF-CMA security of Schnorr signatures implies that they are non-malleable. On the other hand, ECDSA signatures are inherently malleable.
- Linearity: Schnorr signatures provide a simple and efficient method that allows multiple collaborating parties to produce a valid signature for the sum of their public keys.
The collaboration technique or key aggregation “is the building block for various higher-level constructions that improve efficiency and privacy, such as multi-signatures and others,” the Github description adds.
The Schnorr signature scheme is combined with MAST (Merklized Alternative Script Tree), which essentially creates a new scripting language called Tapscript. The Taproot activation page on Github now says: “Taproot locked-in. Thanks miners.” After Taproot was activated a great number of crypto supporters discussed the implementation on social media.
“The Taproot upgrade for Bitcoin has officially [been] activated ”, Bitcoin investor Anthony Pompliano tweeted after upgrading. “Congratulations and thank you to every developer, miner, and Bitcoiner who made this happen.” Another individual dubbed ‘Hashoveride’ tweeted:
Taproot activated! Bitcoin updated! This is how consensus is formed and upgrades are made! Incredibly slow, non-controversial, and not forced. Y’all better recognise. [Bitcoin] ready to fly.
Bitcoin Developer Pieter Wuille: “Finally, BIP341 / 342 (” Taproot “) are active on Bitcoin Mainnet ‘
Bitcoin Core developer Pieter Wuille also discussed the success of the soft fork on Twitter and thanked everyone on the network.
“At long last, BIP341/342 (“taproot”) are active on Bitcoin mainnet. Thanks to everyone involved for getting us this far,” Wuille tweeted. “The real job will be to create portfolios / protocols that build on it to take advantage of its benefits. I’m very excited to see where that takes us,” the Bitcoin developer added. Other bitcoin fans shared data of Taproot being used in the wild. For instance, Alekos Filini wrote:
A modified version @bitcoindevkit performed this operation. This is a Taproot script expense with a 1 of 2 multisig that uses the new `OP_CHECKSIGADD`. It looks like this is the very first `OP_CHECKSIGADD` used on Bitcoin! This is the third Taproot script expense in the block, but the previous two did not use this opcode.
Additionally, the blockchain analysis Open Exploration Tool (oxt.me) tweeted about Taproot usage on the Bitcoin blockchain after the successful implementation. “It’s happening #Taproot”, the oxt.me Twitter account noted, sharing an array of Taproot usage. Bitcoiner Lyle pratt also talked about the benefits of Taproot and explained why he was excited.
“[Three] reasons I’m personally excited about Taproot,” Pratt wrote. “1) the upgrade process gave us a good recipe for future upgrades. 2) Taproot will help proliferate new DLC services and use cases, eventually bringing them to Lightning. 3) Multisig federations of 1 mil + participants are now possible.
When asked by another individual what the benefits of federated multi-sig for many participants would be, Pratt responded by noting: “Much more decentralized pools of signers or oracles are now possible. Pre-taproot about ~15 p2sh signers was the practical limit.”
