That’s it, the long-awaited Taproot update to Bitcoin’s code has been approved by enough miners. The implementation of this soft fork is now confirmed, and will take place by the end of this year.
Bitcoin is making history!
After the event of the adoption of Bitcoin (BTC) as a legal tender in El Salvador, another big news for Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention came this weekend: Taproot’s Bitcoin Protocol Improvements (BIP) received the approval of more than 90% of miners.
Since May 1, miners participating in the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus could update the client of their Bitcoin nodes to send a “bit signal” announcing their willingness to join the Taproot soft fork.
This required – during a period of difficulty (about 15 days) – that a large majority (90%) of miners send this signal, which then resulted in a green square on taproot.watch.
A hesitation that didn’t last very long
If the beginnings were quite difficult, it was only a matter of time. Because on June 12, 2021, enough transaction blocks have validated the famous signal for Taproot.
As reported by the Twitter account @pourteaux, it is at the level of block 687285 that the mining pool Slush Pool has sent the last signal allowing the validation of this new fork.
Since Segregated Witness (SegWit) in 2017, this is the first major update of the Bitcoin code. Its implementation is now scheduled for block 709 632, which should arrive around mid-November 2021.
This batch of improvements, including the Schnorr signature algorithm, will increase the privacy, scalability and flexibility of the BTC network. Even though the number of units of account is fixed (21 million BTC), Bitcoin is also evolving to offer an ever more complete and sophisticated network to its users. The best part is that this latest evolution was validated by a large decentralized consensus.
