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. 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 operate Bitcoin scripts in a myriad of ways
in order 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:
- Provable security: Schnorr signatures are provably
secure. In more detail, they are strongly unforgeable under 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 enables multiple collaborating parties to produce a
signature that is valid 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 script 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 the upgrade. “Congratulations and thank you to every developer,
miner, and Bitcoiner who made this happen.” Another individual dubbed
‘Hashoveride’ tweeted:
Taproot activated! Bitcoin upgraded! This is how
consensus is formed and upgrades are done! Incredibly slow,
non-controversial, and not forced. Y’all better recognise. [Bitcoin]
ready to fly.
Bitcoin Developer Pieter Wuille: ‘At Long Last, BIP341/342 (“Taproot”) Are Active on Bitcoin Mainnet’
Bitcoin Core developer Pieter Wuille also discussed the successful
soft fork on Twitter and thanked all the network participants.
“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 will be in building wallets/protocols that build on top
of it to make use of its advantages. 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
made this transaction. It’s a Taproot script-spend with a 1-of-2
multisig that uses the new `OP_CHECKSIGADD.` It looks like this is the
first ever `OP_CHECKSIGADD` used on Bitcoin! It’s the third Taproot
script-spend in the block, but the two coming in before didn’t use that
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.
tool measuring Taproot usage on the Bitcoin blockchain. Chart shared by
Open Exploration Tool (oxt.me) on November 14, 2021.
“[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 DLCs services and use cases,
eventually bringing them to Lightning. 3) 1 mil+ participant multisig
federations 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.”
source link : https://news.bitcoin.com/highly-anticipated-bitcoin-upgrade-taproot-activates-taproot-script-spends-seen-in-the-wild/
