Taproot is a technology that aims to improve Bitcoin's privacy and ability to create complex smart contracts. This in order to improve its benefits and help the evolution of its growing ecosystem.
UOne of the most recently activated improvements in Bitcoin looking for improve the privacy of the Bitcoin network and its ability to process smart contracts inside of blockchainit's tap root. All this will be possible thanks to the fact that Taproot includes improving how the Schnorr firms and technology MAST within the Bitcoin protocol.
Thus, conventional transactions and advanced transactions made within the Bitcoin blockchain will be completely indistinguishable in the eyes of data supervisors. At the same time that will improve network security, by preventing the disclosure of important data of the transactions carried out.
Furthermore, Taproot also allows the Bitcoin network to expand its capacity to multi-signature for creating smart contracts within your system. This functionality is part of the work done by the developer Greg Maxwell, who presented it publicly in January 2018, and who has finally been accepted this June 12th, 2021. Since then, Taproot is one of the great improvements that you can enjoy within Bitcoin.
How does Taproot work?
Taproot seeks to improve the privacy and implementation of Bitcoin scripts, eliminating the need to reveal important information or data contained within the complete scripts. So it only shows the condition activated at the time the transaction is made. To understand why this implementation is so important, it is necessary to understand how transactions and scripts work within the Bitcoin network.
Firstly, the Bitcoin transactions are defined by a series of scripts or payment terms, known as P2SH, which determine how the cryptocurrencies will be spent in the next transaction. In its simplest form, transactions are protected or secured by means of a public key, where the recipient must provide a signature to demonstrate that they are the owner of those coins, and therefore can spend them.
On the other hand, scripts P2SH they would have the ability to modify or adjust their actions. That is, certain restrictions could be established that condition the spending of bitcoins or actions within the blockchain. For example, you can set functions of time lock or time locks, to determine when bitcoins can be spent, such as an exact date or block height. Conditions can also be established multi-sig or multi-signature, where several users will be the owners of a wallet. And therefore it takes several signatures to authorize and carry out a transaction.
The problem lies in the moment a transaction is made. Since when an expense is authorized, all the conditions of the script are revealed to the network. That is, the activated condition would be automatically revealed along with all other established conditions. So they are exposed to the view and knowledge of all. Which represents a privacy problem for the Bitcoin network, since not all wallets have multi-signature functions or blocking times. Thus, other users can deduce the type of wallet that a recipient used to perform a certain operation.
Therefore, the Taproot implementation helps improve network privacy. To do this, Taproot prevents all the conditions established within the operations from being disclosed. Instead, it only reveals the activated final condition of the transaction. At the same time it will display such transactions as normal or conventional transactions, making it impossible to distinguish them from each other.
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Schnorr and MAST firms, an essential part of Taproot
For this implementation to be possible, the combination of the technologies of the Schnorr firms and MAST (Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree). In this sense, the signatures Schnorr they allow to add multiple signatures in the transactions, and that said signatures can be unified into one.
Thus, the signature scheme could acquire more important uses, by allowing the combination of public keys with signatures in a multisig transaction. Thus they will be indistinguishable from a conventional transaction. For their part, Schnorr firms They are considered to be one of the safest and most reliable versions of elliptic curve cryptography, and it is encoded in 340 BIP. In addition, these signatures are very quick to verify, so that transaction confirmations can be done much faster, improving transaction times.
Use MAST, allows us to make Taproot hide the conditions that were not triggered in a transaction. Instead, only those conditions that were activated within the network are displayed. The solution MAST uses the Merkle tree structure to divide individually all the conditions established for the use of bitcoins. So it does not group them within a single hash, but includes them within the Merkle tree. Which, in turn, provides a Merkle root, where all the coins are stored. Thus, by revealing some data contained within the Merkle tree, this information can be verified. To do this, all you have to do is check if these data are within the Merkle root, a simple and very quick process. The best thing is that all this can be done without having to reveal all the information.
Through this solution, Taproot allows to reveal only the condition that is met when a transaction is made. Keeping all other data hidden and protected. Making the Bitcoin network can implement smart contracts in a much more secure, private and efficient way.
Taproot activation
The final activation of Taproot took place on November 14, 2021, when block number 709.632 was mined, which was mined by the F2Pool pool. With this milestone on the Bitcoin blockchain, the activation of the new consensus rules would then begin that would allow users to send and receive transactions using all the new capabilities that this update brought to the Bitcoin protocol. With this, a development path that began in 2018 was closed and placed a step forward in the development of Bitcoin, as one of the largest blockchain projects in the world.
Advantages of the Taproot implementation
- tap root improves the privacy of the Bitcoin network.
- Along with the MAST solution, makes it difficult to track network users Bitcoin and transactions made.
- Taproot implementation together with Schnorr firms helps to improve network scalability Bitcoin, by reducing the demand for storage space within blocks.
- Taproot will allow a greater adoption of the Bitcoin system, by reducing transaction confirmation times, making the cryptocurrency more fungible and expendable.
All these advantages are now available to Bitcoin users, thanks to the fact that on June 12, 2021, this improvement was accepted within the network by the miners, who had the task of voting for the implementation or not of this improvement .
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