Bitcoin’s New Soft Fork Taproot Successfully Activated First Time Since August 2017

Over the past weekend, the Bitcoin blockchain has successfully activated the Taproot soft fork following a 90% consensus of miners and mining pools between blocks 709 488 and 709 632. This milestone marks the first major update to the Bitcoin network since August 2017, launching a leading tier 2 solution Lightning and SegWit.The Taproot update means greater transaction privacy and efficiency – and crucially, it will unlock the potential for smart contracts, which can be used to eliminate middlemen from transactions.

Taproot would expand on Bitcoin’s smart contract flexibility while offering greater privacy in doing so. Even the most complex smart contracts would typically look indistinguishable from regular transactions.

As commerce becomes increasingly global, the financial system grows and decentralized financial instruments become more ubiquitous than ever before, privacy is often mandatory, these distractions are likely to keep various brick-and-mortar regulators and watchdogs playing catch up and perhaps on the wrong side of history.

Right now, BTC uses the algorithm called the “Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm” which creates a signature from the private key that controls users’ Bitcoin wallets, and ensures that Bitcoin can only be transacted by its real owner. The Taproot will add new functionality known as Schnorr signatures, which essentially makes multi-signature transactions unreadable. Taproot will make opening & closing channels more private & enable clever ways of transaction batching, potentially good for privacy & scalability.

After the support retest at $63,000, BTC surged to $65,300, but thereafter rolled back to around $63,700, and then again recovered to $65,700. The newly reached mark now became BTC’s new resistance level. Today BTC is expected to close its weekly candlestick pattern. To maintain a positive sentiment in the market, the price needs to consolidate above the $65,200 area.