If you follow the Bitcoin mining you may have been waiting for the new fork that has been completed on block height 709632.
What is new with Taproot?
The new soft fork introduce the MAST : Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree MAST to improve the scripting capabilities and privacy of the Bitcoin network.
To understand more about bitcoin forks, the difference between soft and Hard forks, read here.
Taproot upgrade will improve scripting capabilities and privacy by implementing MAST which will replace currently used P2SH (pay to script hash). P2SH and MAST are ways of locking the transactions with conditions until the conditions are met. P2SH allows other users to see the conditions and allows everyone to see all the different ways they could have met the conditions. While MAST hides all the conditions except the ones that are met when the transactions are processed.
The upgrade will also improve Lightning Network privacy by making Lightning Network channels look like regular bitcoin transactions.
Leave a Reply