Taproot Update Gains Approval on The Bitcoin Network

Bitcoin is on the verge of making history with its impending Taproot update, an event as highly-anticipated as SegWit or the last halving.

Arguably the benchmark cryptocurrency’s most ambitious update since 2017, Taproot has gained approval by miners and was locked in for implementation later in November.

Due to its heavily decentralized nature, any update in Bitcoin has to go through an extensive approval process and cannot simply be implemented at will by the Core developers.

90% Consensus Vote Reached for Taproot Update Approval

For Taproot, miners reached a consensus and forwarded a signal of approval to the network. To gain approval, 90% of blocks mined during a Difficulty Period needed to signal for the update. This milestone got achieved today.

A Difficulty Period refers to the amount of time it takes between two difficulty adjustments. The Bitcoin network operates by balancing the computational power contributed by miners with the difficulty of the algorithms these miners have to solve.

The idea behind mining difficulty is to present an operation so hard that miners can only solve one block every ten minutes. That said, when more miners enter the network, blocks get mined easily due to the influx of computational power. Likewise, the outflow on miners leads to an increase in block difficulty.

Meanwhile, when there is excess mining power, the network automatically increases the difficulty during the readjustment and vice versa. This readjustment occurs at the hit of every 2016 block, which usually comes by every two weeks.

The voting process that activated the Taproot update occurred over the last 2016 blocks and is known as a Speedy Trial.

If miners had failed to reach a consensus agreement during the Speedy Trial, the responsibility would have shifted to the UASF (User Activated Soft-Fork). However, this process poses a risk of bringing network nodes into conflict with one another.

Many members of the crypto community are excited about the taproot upgrade. They believe that while it would improve the functionalities of the Bitcoin network, it would also get interpreted as a bullish sign for traders and investors, which should send the price of BTC soaring.

At press time, BTC trades around $36,000 as bulls struggle to regain dominance.

 

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