Blockstream co-founder Pieter Wuille and prolific Bitcoin developer on 6th May 2019 finally revealed two BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposals) over GitHub for a Taproot soft fork. The proposals were sent though bitcoin-dev mailing list which consists of series of BIP’s that is taken from innovative cryptographic advancements.
Taproot is a technique, and the objective of Taproot is to merge the Schnorr signature scheme and Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree (MAST) advantages, this will in-turn help to reveal less information after a bitcoin transaction is carried out.
Pieter Wuille, a Belgian engineer, has revealed two unique and supportive documents that offer details of soft fork potential which combines Schnorr signatures, Tapscript and Taproot. To maintain transparency and to influence peer reviewing, the documents were put on GitHub.
The points that are noted in the proposals of Wuille are as follows:
“Taproot to make all outputs and cooperative spend indistinguishable from each other.”
Merkle branches will hide the unimplemented branches in scripts. Schnorr signatures allow wallet software to make use of key aggregation/thresholds across one input.
The two proposals briefs that Taproot is a code change developed to increase the privacy of bitcoin. The taproot will be combined with Schnoor within the soft fork. The developers have been waiting for it, and this has opened the way for developers to enhance the scalability and privacy of Bitcoin.
These technologies were discussed within the community members for a lot of time and developers were thinking how to arrange these specific upgrade. Over the years, numerous changes were suggested to bitcoin, and it is good to execute them together. The proposed changes were MAST and Schnorr Signature and Taproot.
Including MAST will enhance smart Bitcoin contracts and adding Schnorr signature will offer another method to sign transactions related to bitcoin and Taproot will add more privacy to Bitcoin.
By bringing such kind of Taproot proposals and making it available on Github is signaling out that developments like this are finally coming together.
One of the significant things of the two proposals is that the technical details have made public and now it will help developers within the community to study and review them, and see if they can agree upon the changes. If the developers think that these changes are the correct one to implement, then they can proceed with the change to make it go live.
The time and the concepts that will be used for the next upgrade is explained in the BIP, and it will add advanced upgrades of Taproot and Schnorr, Wuille mentioned:
“not adding any new strong security assumptions and not combining into the proposal any functionality which could be simply implemented independently.”
Pieter Wuille is not only the bitcoin core developer to get into this development, but the one who remained strong in developing enhancements that improve the protocol through soft forks. We should be great-full for his contribution and because of him we now have a BTC wallet clients market beyond Bitcoin core, we are allowed to use deterministic wallets that can be altered within clients (BIP 32) and size of the block can be expanded whenever there is a high network demand through SegWit.