Glossary

Taproot

Hard

Taproot is an instantiation of a soft fork for Bitcoin, intended to both improve privacy and improve other aspects tied to more complex transactions.

What Is Taproot?

Taproot is being touted as one of the most interesting 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 improve other aspects tied to more complex transactions.

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 by furnishing Bitcoin with a signature scheme known as Schnorr signatures. Schnorr Signatures were developed by Claus Schnorr and offer an advantage insofar as they can take multiple keys within a complex Bitcoin transaction and produce a single signature.

At present, transactions on Bitcoin can tap a range of complex features, such as timelock or multi-signature. Without Taproot, anyone can detect transactions that use these complex functions. Once the Bitcoin blockchain has been upgraded with the Taproof implementation, it will be possible to make all of these private. These complex transactions will simply appear like 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 where more complex methods have in fact been used.