What Is Taproot?
Taproot is being touted as one of the most exciting upgrades to Bitcoin since the introduction of SegWit to the cryptocurrency‘s blockchain.
It will be an instantiation of a soft fork, intended to both improve privacy and enhance other aspects tied to more complex transactions.
Revolutionizing Bitcoin’s Scripting
Its goal is to change the way in which the scripts operate within Bitcoin in order to improve the blockchain’s privacy, scalability, and security.
Taproot is designed to achieve this by implementing a signature scheme known as Schnorr signatures.
Schnorr signatures, developed by Claus Schnorr, offer an advantage because they can take multiple keys within a complex Bitcoin transaction and produce a single signature.
Unlocking Enhanced Privacy
Currently, transactions on Bitcoin can utilize a range of complex features such as timelocks or multi-signatures.
Without Taproot, anyone can detect transactions that use these complex functions.
Once the Bitcoin blockchain has been upgraded with the Taproot implementation, it will be possible to make all of these private.
These complex transactions will simply appear as a single transaction, thereby increasing Bitcoin’s privacy.
Taproot even makes it possible to hide that a Bitcoin script has run altogether.
Anyone monitoring the blockchain would see nothing but peer-to-peer transactions, even when more complex methods have been used.