Bitcoin Taproot Upgrade: When Is The Bitcoin Taproot Date, And What Is It?

After finally gaining consensus, the bitcoin taproot upgrade is locked in and ready for activation.

Of course, bitcoin is not alone in receiving a significant update over the coming months. Cardano Goguen and Ethereum 2.0 upgrades are also slated for release pretty soon.

Here's a rundown on what the bitcoin taproot upgrade will bring.

What is the Bitcoin Taproot Upgrade?

First proposed by Gregory Maxwell in 2018, the bitcoin Taproot upgrade will make a slight chance to the code, marking most notable update to bitcoin for over four years.

Taproot's major changes come through its implementation of Schnorr signatures. These should enhance privacy for complex transactions with multiple signatures by making these transactions appear identical to others on the ledger.

Alongside this privacy boost, Taproot will reduce the amount of data required for these transactions. This will subsequently lower transaction costs. By reducing the amount of information revealed on the blockchain, transactions will be smaller, allowing for more transactions in every block.

This increased efficiency also could pave the way for further smart contract usage on the blockchain.

The Taproot Activation Code is now available for download in Bitcoin Core 0.21.1.

Bitcoin Taproot Upgrade Release Date

The Taproot activation is locked in for a November 2021 release, following its approval by bitcoin miners in June.

In a process known as a Speedy Trial, miners signalled approval for Taproot through deploying softforks in mined blocks. To gain approval, Taproot needs a 90% consensus, or approval from 90% of blocks in a period of 2016 blocks. It hit this threshold of 1815 blocks on June 12.

Taproot will now go through a hefty testing process ahead of enforcement by block 709,632 - estimated to be mined in mid-November. This should help avoid an incident that could damage the currency, previously seen in Version 0.7 and 0.8 whereby a bug caused bitcoin's blockchain to fork before miners quickly reverted back to the previous version.

As of July 11, 26.1% of Bitcoin nodes have upgraded to Taproot.

Taproot was initially released as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP 341) on January 19, 2020. The opposition to Taproot was aimed towards how to activate Taproot (LOT = True or False), rather than on the changes it made, before the Speedy Trial idea was offered as a solution.

READ MORE: Ethereum EIP-1559: Release Date and Meaning

[Featured Photo by Jeremy Zero on Unsplash]