Twitter chief and crypto enthusiast Jack Dorsey is plugging Taproot, Bitcoin’s upcoming upgrade.
In a new tweet to his 5.3 million followers, Dorsey posted the link to the Taproot activation page that shows the progress of the flagship crypto asset’s update.
Taproot is a soft fork that aims to enhance Bitcoin’s privacy measures, smart contract flexibility, and ability to mask complex transactions on the blockchain. It is the first major upgrade since Segwit (Segregated Witness) in 2017.
Crypto exchange Binance notes that Taproot will help Bitcoin owners “cloak” the methods used to increase the privacy of BTC transactions.
“In fact, Taproot makes it possible to hide the fact that a Bitcoin script ran at all. For example, spending Bitcoin using Taproot could make a transaction in a Lightning Network channel, a peer-to-peer transaction, or a sophisticated smart contract become indistinguishable. Anyone monitoring one of these transactions would see nothing but a peer-to-peer transaction.”
Taproot is currently in its “Speedy Trial” phase. Explains the Taproot page,
“BIP9 and Speedy Trial is a soft fork deployment method where the miners and mining pools help to coordinate the deployment of a soft fork. They do so by signalling for deployment of the soft fork in their mined blocks. To lock in the softfork for activation, 90% of the blocks have to signal.
The signalling method works in periods of 2,016 blocks, meaning that within a 2,016 block period, 90%, or 1,815 of the 2,016 blocks have to signal for readiness.”
If the upgrade receives 90% support, the Taproot soft fork will be activated in November of this year.
Though Dorsey didn’t elaborate on his ominous tweet of the Taproot upgrade, the billionaire tech entrepreneur is a vocal BTC bull, predicting in 2018 that Bitcoin would be the world’s single internet currency within 10 years. He also believes that Bitcoin mining goes hand-in-hand with the creation of green, renewable energy sources.
The Twitter boss also famously turned the very first tweet to ever appear on the platform into a non-fungible token (NFT) and received sky-high bids, well into the 7 figures.
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