Taproot is a proposed upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol. It seeks to improve upon the existing technology by introducing new features and increasing privacy for users. Taproot builds on previous proposals such as Schnorr Signatures and MAST, aiming to provide more efficient transaction validation and improved scalability of smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Taproot was first proposed in 2018 by developer Gregory Maxwell, who argued that having different types of transactions use different cryptographic signatures adds complexity to the system, making it unnecessarily hard to scale. As a result, he proposed using a single type of signature (known as “taproots”) which could be used for all types of transactions. This would have several advantages:
1) Simplify Transaction Validation – By collapsing multiple signature schemes into one, validating transactions will become simpler and faster since there are fewer operations involved in verifying them.
2) Increase Privacy – Taproots also allow users more control over their own privacy since they can hide certain details about their transactions from public view while still being able to authenticate them with a single signature scheme. This makes it harder for any third party observer or miner to determine what kind of transaction occurred without direct access to other data related to it like input scripts or outputs.
3) Improve Scalability – Lastly, taproots make it easier for smart contracts built on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain network because they require less data than before when verifying each individual component part within any given contract which improves overall scalability across its network infrastructure too!
