Bitcoin Taproot Activation Set to Lock In This Weekend

Bitcoin (BTC)’s major Taproot upgrade might lock in in less than 24 hours as more than the required minimum of miners are signaling support for the soft fork, indicates taproot.watch.

According to the website, at 14:24 UTC, the current signalling ratio is 98.38%. A minimum of 90% of all miners signaling support for Taproot is needed to lock in the soft fork activation, and there are 290 blocks that are yet to be mined until the next mining difficulty adjustment.

Out of these 290 blocks, 117 of them have to be “green” in order to meet the 90% threshold, meaning that the Taproot will lock in with this current signaling ratio.

The next difficulty adjustment is estimated to happen in two days, per mining pool BTC.com, but if the current signaling ratio is maintained, Taproot should be locked in in less than a day.

Bitcoin educator and entrepreneur Andreas M. Antonopoulos said that the much-debated “Speedy Trial” Taproot activation method was “a big success,” and that he was optimistic about the fact that it took only two of total six epochs for the miners to coordinate the upgrade.

The “Speedy Trial” is a soft fork deployment method that allows miners and mining pools to coordinate the network upgrades. They do so by signaling for deployment in their mined blocks. When at least 1,815 blocks out of 2,016 that make an epoch confirm miner readiness, then full up-to-date nodes of the network consider the signaling a success and activate the soft fork.

Therefore, the Taproot activation will be set to occur in November.

The Taproot upgrade is a major one – the biggest since SegWit in 2017 – as it will expand Bitcoin’s smart contract and scripting capabilities along with bringing better privacy measures. It can also improve privacy on the second layer solutions like the Lightning Network by making channels look like regular Bitcoin transactions if integrated into the Lightning implementations.

BTC is trading at USD 37,419. It’s almost unchanged in a day and it dropped almost 5% in a week and 34% in a month.

Listen to this episode of “Speaking of Bitcoin” podcast to learn more about the power dynamics and activation of network upgrades:

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Learn more:
– Taproot, CoinSwap, Mercury Wallet, and the State of Bitcoin Privacy in 2021
– As Bitcoin’s Taproot Nears, Ex-CIA Director’s Paper Raises Privacy Concerns
– Don’t Take Your Privacy For Granted As Regulators Get Anxious About Crypto