Thread by @srinathariharan

Bitcoin's taproot upgrade is a huge deal for the entire crypto community

It has finally received approval from miners to move ahead

h/t @KenzieSigalos

What is Taproot and what does it mean?

A breakdown for the avg non technical user

🧵(1/8)

Proposed by Gregory Maxwell:

Taproot was first proposed in 2018 by Gregory Maxwell,

Greg used to be the CTO of @Blockstream till 2018,

After which he left to work on Bitcoin's core development (2/8)

Context: First upgrade in 4 years

After SegWit(block size increase) in 2017,

Taproot is the first time an upgrade is happening to Bitcoin

See the live signalling status at taproot.watch

h/t @hampus_s (3/8)

Upgrade: Schnorr Signatures

Bitcoin will use the smaller and faster Schnorr over the existing ECDSA

This has a plethora of benefits across - privacy, speed, transactions costs and smart contracts

contd. (4/8)

Better Privacy:

Schnorr makes transactions of all types, irrespective of signatures they need - look the same from the outside

It does this by combining signatures into a single Schnorr signature

A micropayment on lightning will look the same as a complex smart contract

(5/8)

Faster:

Schnorr makes transactions faster

This is because bitcoin nodes process transactions one signature at a time

And with Schnorr, all of the signatures can be combined and verified by a node together
(6/8)

Lower fees:

Since not all conditions of any transaction need to be revealed

Less is verified and consequently it costs less to transact

(7/8)

Activated in November:

After a 5 month waiting period where nodes and miner can upgrade software

And Bitcoin reaches a Block height ie. total number of blocks in the mainchain of 709,632, the upgrades get activated (8/8)

TL:DR Taproot means:

- better privacy
- Faster transactions
- lower txn fees
- Opens larger smart contract use cases on btc

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