Historical retrospective · Bitcoin

BIP 341 combined Taproot outputs with a new spending design

BIP 341 defines SegWit version 1 outputs that commit to a public key and optionally a Merkle root of script conditions.

Proposal / specification year: 2020First published

The construction lets many ordinary and complex spending conditions share a more uniform on-chain appearance, with benefits for privacy and efficiency in suitable cases.

Taproot’s 2021 activation marked Bitcoin’s first major consensus upgrade since SegWit.

The privacy improvement is conditional: revealing a script path still exposes that path, and adoption depends on wallet practices.

Primary source

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BIP 341 ↗