Taproot, one of the most anticipated Bitcoin (BTC) upgrades, and its largest alteration since 2017, expected to improve privacy, scalability, flexibility, and speed of the network – may be coming in a matter of months.
Pierre Rochard, Bitcoin evangelist and strategist at crypto exchange Kraken, suggested that the next year is the one to look forward to for all those waiting to see this protocol upgrade.
Compiled this list because I tend to mess up the timeline of Taproot dev. In hindsight, the time it took (so far) seems appropriate given available resources and magnitude of the spec while having adequate opportunity for public review. https://t.co/Q11sjsLbHe has the links. pic.twitter.com/J0x935UrkL
— ncklr (@n1ckler) November 30, 2020
“I think the main topic and development focus in 2021 will be Schnorr and Taproot adoption that is coming to Bitcoin,” developer Stepan Snigirev recently told Our. “This will mean a lot of benefits and also a lot of work for software and hardware wallet companies.” Snigirev added that the adoption of these two upgrades will facilitate a number of other technology innovations for Bitcoin, such as Lightning, Multisig, and MuSig – with the latter two being embedded in Taproot.
Meanwhile, per a Twitter thread by ‘Sebastian’, there is a “very small short term negative effect [of Taproot which] is well known,” but the improvements “down the road more than outweigh it.” He argues that, long term, Taproot benefits Bitcoin’s privacy and makes Layer 2 protocols (any protocol built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain) more efficient, thus further improving scalability.
