Bitcoin advocates are celebrating the successful implementation of the Taproot upgrade after block height 709,632. The upgrade was highly anticipated as it was one of the biggest changes since the introduction of Segregated Witness (Segwit) in 2017. The upgrade was completed and the Bitcoin community began measuring Taproot usage.

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. This upgrade took seven years, and was much-awaited.

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— jack (@jack) November 14, 2021

Taproot enables users to use Bitcoin scripts in many different ways to increase privacy, security, and scalability. 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. According to the codebase introduction on Github, Schnorr has three main benefits:

• Provable security: Schnorr signatures are provably secure. They are strong unforgeable in response to a chosen message attack (SUF–CMA).
• Non-malleability: The SUF-CMA security of Schnorr signatures implies that they are non-malleable. ECDSA signatures, on the other hand are intrinsically malleable.
• Linearity: Schnorr signatures provide a simple and efficient method that enables multiple collaborating parties to produce a signature that is valid for the sum of their public keys.

The collaboration technique or key aggregate “is the building block of various higher-level constructions which improve efficiency and privacy such as multisignatures,” says Github.

The Schnorr signature scheme is combined with MAST (Merklized Alternative Script Tree), which essentially creates a new script language called Tapscript. Taproot is now activated on Github. Many crypto supporters thanked the miners after Taproot was activated.

“The Taproot upgrade for Bitcoin has officially [been] activated,” bitcoin investor Anthony Pompliano tweeted after the upgrade. “Congratulations and thank you to every developer, miner, and Bitcoiner who made this happen.” Another individual dubbed ‘Hashoveride’ tweeted:

Taproot activated! Bitcoin has been upgraded This is how consensus forms and upgrades are made! It is slow, not controversial, and it is not forced. You’ll need to recognize this. [Bitcoin] Ready to Fly.

Bitcoin Developer Pieter Wuille: ‘At Long Last, BIP341/342 (“Taproot”) Are Active on Bitcoin Mainnet’

Pieter Wuille,

Bitcoin Core Developer, also discussed the success of the soft fork via Twitter and thanked everyone who participated.

“At long last, BIP341/342 (“taproot”) are active on Bitcoin mainnet. Thanks to everyone involved for getting us this far,” Wuille tweeted. “The real work lies in creating wallets/protocols to build on top of it and make the most of its benefits. “I’m excited to see what that leads us,” said the Bitcoin developer. Other bitcoin fans shared data of Taproot being used in the wild. For instance, Alekos Filini wrote:

A modified version @bitcoindevkit made this transaction. This transaction was made by Taproot script-spend using a 1-of-2 multisig and the new OP_CHECKSIGADD. This is the third Taproot scriptspend in the block. However, the two before it didn’t 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 said, sharing a Taproot usage chart. Bitcoiner Lyle Pratt also talked about the benefits of Taproot and explained why he was excited.

“[Three] reasons that I’m excited about Taproot,” Pratt wrote. “1) The upgrade process provided us with a solid recipe for future upgrades. 2) taproot will allow us to proliferate new DLCs services, use cases, and eventually bring them to Lightning. 3) 1 mil+ participant multisig federations are now possible.”

When Pratt was asked by another person what the benefits of federated multisig for many participants were, Pratt replied that “Much more decentralized pool of signers or oracles oracles are now feasible.” Pre-taproot about ~15 p2sh signers was the practical limit.”

What do you think about the successful implementation of the Bitcoin upgrade Taproot and the community’s opinion about the latest soft fork?