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The Bitcoin Improvement Proposals 340 through 342 were merged into the Bitcoin codebase on Thursday, signaling that the anticipated Taproot upgrade is ready.

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Taproot
and the associated technology of Schnorr signatures are considered to
be the most important upgrade for Bitcoin in the past year. It is
primarily a privacy improvement for complex spending conditions on
Bitcoin like multisig transactions, time locks and other conditions
based on Bitcoin Script.

As Cointelegraph reported previously, Taproot hides every additional spending condition
beyond the one that was activated. For example, a transaction might be
executed immediately if all four multisig signers agree, or it could
require a certain amount of time to pass before funds are unlocke if
only three out of four signers are present. Normally, an outsider is
able to identify every possible condition, but with Taproot they will
see only the one that was eve triggered.

Furthermore, thanks to
Schnorr signatures, a pure multisig transaction can be made
indistinguishable from normal transfers. It is worth addressing that
Taproot makes no changes to mixing protocols like CoinJoin, which will
remain easily distinguishable.

While the initial code for Taproot was submitted for review in January, some complications primarily related to Schnorr signatures required an extensive amount of refinement.

The
proposals have now been fully reviewed by Bitcoin core developers and
are ready to be included in a client release. Pieter Wuille, the lead
developer for Taproot, told Cointelegraph that “it’s all done, except
activation.”

Cointelegraph previously reported that consensus for activation may require some time to be reached.
The process could potentially last for years, though Taproot is
generally considered much less controversial than previous upgrades like
SegWit.

The process starts as soon as the activation code is
included in Bitcoin Core, allowing miners to signal approval for its
inclusion. But Taproot seems to have come slightly at the wrong time for
immediate activation.

Jonas Nick, researcher at Blockstream and
Bitcoin core developer, told Cointelegraph that “Taproot is not ready
for activation yet.”

He explained that activation logic is
generally not included in a major release, referring to the upcoming
0.21 version. The codebase reached “feature freeze” on Thursday, with
the base Taproot code making it just in time. Nevertheless, nly bug
fixes will be added from now on. Explaining why developers are cautious,
Nick said:

“Major releases can contain changes to
dependencies and interfaces (e.g. RPC). Users should be able to run
softfork activation logic without the additional work required to be
compatible with a new major version.”

The logic to
activate Taproot on mainnet is likely to be included in a future minor
version, but in the meantime, Nick said that “Taproot could be activated
on something like signet or testnet if someone produced the code for
that,” as the raw implementation is already present.