Bitcoin and privacy - the Taproot update

Among delirious tweets and the market flash-crashing, Bitcoin has started its process towards the adoption of an update that will improve privacy of all transactions against financial surveillance.

Among all the recent drama and market crash, the Bitcoin network has started it’s process toward adoption of one of the most important updates since SegWit.

Here comes Taproot, one of the most important updates of the last few years

In the last few days more than 90% of the miners signaled their support to Taproot, a new update (a soft fork) which has been in the making for a few years now.

The update might not pass in the current epoch however, but if the signaling stays the same, the update might pass in a couple of weeks. If all goes well, we should see it fully active in november or december 2021.

Once active, Taproot will bring many new features to Bitcoin.

Taproot will improve the scalability of Bitcoin and it will largely improve the privacy of its transactions.

Wait, what? Why do we need more privacy, isn’t Bitcoin anonymous!?

Well, no. Even if Bitcoin was born out of Cypherpunk ideology, which always had privacy as a core principle, it’s sadly not at all private or anonymous.

Bit…