Bitcoin Taproot is about to kickstart on November 16th. This update will improve Bitcoin significantly with faster, cheaper, and safer transactions.
What is Taproot?
It is a soft fork proposal to enable Bitcoin payment through Schnorr public key.
Schnorr public key
Schnorr Signature is an improvement of the existing Bitcoin signature system. It requires a shorter signature and the private key is intractable.
Shorter signature
The shorter the signature, the shorter the hash function. The file size of the hash function can be reduced from 512-bit to 384-bit while the security level is the same. It significantly reduced the space by 25% and increased the speed of transactions by 25% or more.
Intractability
The idea is that a Bitcoin private key can be shared among multiple people with multiple private keys with multiple signatures (multisigs) to increase its security concerns. As long as there are more than the majority of private keys to access the account, the wallet can be opened. It prevents any traceable public ledger and possibly only one private key to access the wallet and to prevent a single point of failure.
Hidden scripts
Schnorr signature can also be able to allow hidden signature scripts that do not tell whether the party is using single or multiple signatures to sign off the transaction.
Increase security, increase privacy
From Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm or ECDSA to Schnorr Signature, it can boost up the privacy of the account holders and increase security more than ever.
Why not implement Schnorr in the first place
Such security technology was patented until 2008, while Satoshi created Bitcoin in 2008. Satoshi might have been concerned about copyright infringement at that time. Schnorr signature then did to implement until later.
Some other concerns
Although there are many great benefits, there are trade-offs for the improvement. You now need to trust the majority of parties that you share private keys with them.
In conclusion
The taproot will change Bitcoin into more secure and safe crypto and enhance its strength. However, there may be some concerns that are unforeseen linked to such privacy updates. We will see how it works out.