Bitcoin Taproot Explainer – Bitcoin Magazine: Bitcoin News, Articles, Charts, and Guides

Taproot and Schnorr signatures are going live on Bitcoin at block 709,632. This is going to be a massive foundational achievement to continue building on into the future. It’s been four years since Segregated Witness went live on the network, our last major protocol upgrade. That’s as long as a halvening cycle!

Think about that. Four years from SegWit going live to Taproot going live. Slow, methodical patience, as it should be. But Taproot/Schnorr’s history goes back a lot further than that.

The History Of Taproot

Some who have been here a while might find this ironic, but the first mention of Schnorr signatures that I’m aware of was actually from former Bitcoin Core developer turned enterprise blockchain builder Mike Hearn. In 2012, he brought up the idea of a new cryptographic curve in relation to the batch verification of signatures to make node validation less computationally expensive. Ultimately, the scheme he was proposing was dependent on Schnorr signatures.



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