Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, has received its biggest upgrade in years as the taproot block activated at 709,632.
The Taproot upgrade is the biggest upgrade in four years, following the Segregated Witness, or “SegWit,” upgrade to bitcoin’s network in July 2017. The current upgrade is expected to improve privacy, scalability and security on the network.
Unlike the controversial SegWit, Taproot gained almost universal consent when more than 90% of miners indicated their support.
Taproot, which was first proposed in 2018 by Bitcoin Core contributor Gregory Maxwell, opens the door to various technological innovations including improving many things for the network such as privacy features and scalability.
A report from Coindesk noted that, so far, only over half of the known bitcoin nodes are indicating support for the upgrade. The rest are running older software, which means they won’t be able to implement Taproot’s new rules just yet — at least, until they upgrade to Bitcoin Core 21.1.
One of the key changes due to the current upgrade is that it helps with greater transaction privacy and efficiency, which will unlock the potential of smart contracts, which can be used to eliminate middlemen from transactions.
Developers, who are looking for ways to use the current space more efficiently, cannot easily increase this limit without affecting the decentralization of bitcoin. Taproot may address this as bitcoin’s limited transaction space is plaguing the digital currency.
Bitcoin is currently trading at $64,097 today with a market cap of $1.21 trillion.
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