Bitcoin miners have met the conditions for activating the Taproot update. The soft fork will take place around mid-November 2021 at block # 709632, said developer Peter Welle.
The developers have implemented the Speed Trial update activation method in the Bitcoin Core release in May. The mechanism implies a three-month window during which 90% of the blocks mined in any of the approximately two-week periods between difficulty recalculations should signal support for the fork.
During the past "era of difficulty", at block # 687 284, this criterion was met. According to Taproot Watch, to date, 100% of Bitcoin mining pools have supported the update.
Developer Hampus Sjöberg noted that 24.4% of nodes have switched to Taproot-enabled software. However, miners have almost five months to install the new version of Bitcoin Core.
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Fred Thiel, CEO of mining company Marathon Digital Holdings, said in the Thinking Crypto podcast that Taproot will turn Bitcoin into a "settlement network." He noted that the update will improve the efficiency of smart contracts by lowering transaction costs.
Bitcoin Core developer Jeremy Rubin expressed a similar opinion. In the podcast Unchained, he piled on Taproot to "optimize" bitcoin and added that the initiative would increase the privacy of the network.
The update will be one of the most important in the history of the first cryptocurrency, but some experts believe that it poses a potential threat to privacy.