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.
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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