Taproot Technology Launch To Enhance Privacy In Bitcoin, Upgrade Causing Delay

BTC Wires: Taproot technology, which promises to fix the atrocious privacy settings of Bitcoin, is almost ready to be rolled out for use but is being held back by the delay in implementing the Schnorr upgrade and a lack of consensus between developers as to what features are to be included in the new system. In the current scheme of things, the transparency enjoyed by Bitcoin users comes at a cost of privacy because all transactions are laid bare on the web for everyone to access and view.

What Taproot aims to do is make all the transactions on the blockchain look identical to visitors so that privacy breaches don’t take place. Proposed by Greg Maxwell in January, the idea of the Taproot code had generated quite a bit of interest then but has since died down owing to the slump in bitcoin and the availablity of several new technologies to fawn over. However, bitcoin developers are still attempting to improve the code for a future rolling-out of the technology. While Bitcoin Core Contributor and Xapo engineer Anthony Towns suggested a measure to cut down data consumption in the privacy tech mathematician Andrew Poelstra fashioned a mathematical security proof some months back.

The fact that developers haven’t given up yet shows their continued faith in this privacy enhancing technology for Bitcoin. Test code is already being implemented but certain aspects of Bitcoin, like the complex ones under smart contracts, are taking some more time to create. To be successful, Maxwell’s technology needs to make use of Schnorr, a bitcoin signature scheme upgrade that enhances the whole system by allowing signature data to be blended into one. Now, since the implementation of Schnorr has been taking years and the developers are waiting for it to be finally put in use so they can build on it.

Towns claimed that Schnorr was the key change they were all waiting for but Taproot was the “cherry on top”. He further explained that the developers were looking at a bunched rolling out of the Taproot, Schnorr and Graftroot all together. With several proposed changes however, it is proving to be difficult to determine the set of changes to be rolled out first. Even so, industry insiders remain hopeful that the upgrade as well as the Taproot tech will be rolled by the end of this year.

Dmitriy

Having majored in Social Psychology and Economics, I worked as a team lead of a tech and fundamental analysis lab in the Applied System Analysis Research Institute. I write financial articles for various international media. I also hold the position of a Chief Analyst at RoboForex.