Two Largest Bitcoin Mining Pools Antpool and Poolin add Taproot Support

Taproot, the latest major upgrade on the Bitcoin network since 2017 has started to gain traction among miners and mining pools. Two of the largest Bitcoin mining pools Antpool and Poolin have become the latest to integrate taproot. Taproot is a soft fork first proposed in 2018 by the Bitcoin core developer Gregory Maxwell and it promises to increase privacy and other aspects related to complex transaction issues. If implemented it would not just add privacy to crypto transactions it would also ease up the load on the network by nearly 20% as it segregates multiple transactions in one.

The two largest #Bitcoin mining pools have now signalled support for the privacy and scalabilty update, Taproot.

Antpool and Poolin: pic.twitter.com/z5R9cdbi1y

— Documenting Bitcoin (@DocumentingBTC) May 4, 2021

Taproot is being lauded as the biggest upgrade since SegWit integration in 2017, it combines the Schnorr signature scheme with MAST (Merklized Alternative Script Tree) and a new scripting language called Tapscrip that would increase Bitcoin’s smart contract flexibility. The transaction on the Bitcoin network is definitely secure, but anyone can trace the transaction for now, while the Taproot activation would ensure that multiple transactions can be cloaked to view as a single transaction.

Bitcoin being a decentralized network the new consensus requires a commutative acceptance rather than a single source making the decision. Thus in order to activate taproot on the Bitcoin network, a certain number of miners need to incorporate the consensus rule in a given time frame.

Would Taproot Turn Out to Be a Success?

The last major upgrade in the form of SegWit received a lot of opposition from many miners and as a result, the integration was not as fruitful or widely adopted as many would have liked. The Taproot adoption time frame started a couple of days ago and miners now have 3 months to collectively accept or reject the integration.

New block signaling readiness for Taproot by F2Pool! About 25% of hashrate signaling now. pic.twitter.com/5IGYeknCG1

— Murch (@murchandamus) May 2, 2021

If 90% of the blocks mined during the said phase include the “signal bit,” it would be activated by November this year.

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