The Bitcoin Taproot upgrade is likely to undergo a rapid test. If successful, the upgrade will be activated around mid-November. Taproot is already backed by several miners.
The Bitcoin Core team has suggested Taproot upgrade activation dates. Suggested dates include a “quick test” in May with the main Taproot upgrade following in November.
Taproot aims to improve the scalability and privacy of bitcoin. This is the biggest code upgrade that has been enabled in years.
Bitcoin Core team member Jeremy Rubin described these plans in a public online Relay chat. He explains that the consensus among stakeholders confirms that a “quick” test should be conducted in mid-May. If successful, the upgrade will go online on November 15th.
The quick test will be carried out to show the intentions of the mining community in terms of their broad support for the proposed upgrade.
As a result, the faster the expected “signals” are collected, the faster Taproot will be activated. However, Rubin notes that there is a consensus not to promote activation after November 15th, as then the holidays begin.
“The end of Thanksgiving turns into Christmas, a new year, a new Chinese New Year, and we now see March as the next date people could plan,” he says.
While these notes are a promising sign that this bitcoin upgrade is approaching its implementation, as the history of bitcoin code development so far has shown us, there is no certainty.
The original Taproot proposal was introduced in May 2019 by Bitcoin Core member Peter Wuille, and according to calculations made by BitMex, changes proposed to be introduced in the upgrade on the management of “signatures” could lead to improvement of efficiency by about 13.1%, while enhancing security.
In December 2020, Binance Pool joined the idea along with other miners by giving the “yes” to the realisation of the Taproot, increasing the consensus among the miners to the respectable 91.05%.
Despite the general consensus on Taproot, the recent note contains a footnote to a simultaneously activated “fork” by users (UASF – User Activated Soft Fork). The developers write the code for this UASF in case the test fails. In this case, the UASF will be able to be distributed online.
The discussion focused on whether the UASF should be able to be released before the test. Nevertheless, the Taproot upgrade is already quite popular, so it is more likely that the test will be successful.
