The Bitcoin blockchain plans to implement a soft fork at block height 70963 2, which should occur in November 2021. This fork will bring Taproot updates and Schnorr signature upgrades .
What is the Bitcoin Taproot upgrade?
Taproot is the name of the next bitcoin protocol update (soft fork), one of the most important and anticipated since 2017’s SegWit upgrade.
The Taproot upgrade will improve the script function and privacy performance by applying MAST (Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree). It will replace the P2SH script (pay to script hash) currently used on the Internet. P2SH and MAST are used Reconciliation A method of locking a transaction until a specified reconciliation is met. P2SH allows other users to see the conditions, and allows anyone to see all the different ways they can meet the conditions, while MAST hides all but the conditions met when processing the transaction.
By making Lightning Network transactions more similar to regular Bitcoin transactions, this upgrade will also upgrade Lightning Network privacy performance by making Lightning Network transactions more similar to regular Bitcoin transactions.
What is a Schnorr upgrade?
Bitcoin requires signatures to confirm transactions, but currently, Bitcoin is still using ECDSA, which itself does not support composite signature transactions. The Schnorr signature solution can aggregate multiple signatures and output them as a single signature , which improves privacy performance and reduces transaction size as well as fees.