Wybo Wiersma – a 40-year-old Oxford University graduate – has been sentenced to four and a half years in prison after scamming over $2 million in crypto from unsuspecting victims. Following his arrest in 2019, the Dutchman was extradited from the Netherlands back to the United Kingdom (UK) in 2021. Following a five-year investigation by the South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU), he pled guilty on January 26 to the Oxford Crown Court. A Five-Year Investigation As reported by…
What is Bitcoin Taproot?
Bitcoin Taproot is an upgrade to the Bitcoin scripting language that would improve the flexibility and privacy of Bitcoin’s multi-signature functionality. It accomplishes it by introducing a new type of transaction output called a “Taproot output.” This allows multiple participants to jointly control a Bitcoin address and create more complex smart contract functionality.
In a Taproot transaction, all of the participants in the transaction contribute public keys, and a single script (the Taproot) is created that can be spent in one of two ways: either by any of the participants using their private key or by all of the participants jointly using a combination of their private keys. This allows for more complex smart contract functionality, such as creating “threshold” signatures where a certain number of participants must sign off on a transaction before it can be executed.
The increased privacy of Taproot transactions comes from all of the participants in a Taproot transaction using the same script, so it is impossible to tell which participant signed a given transaction. This makes it difficult for external parties to tell which specific participants were involved in a particular transaction, improving the privacy of Bitcoin’s multi-signature functionality.
The Benefits of Taproot Upgrade
There are several benefits that the proposed Taproot upgrade would bring to the Bitcoin network:
- Increased flexibility: Taproot allows for more complex multi-signature functionality, which enables the creation of more advanced smart contracts.
- Improved privacy: Taproot transactions use the same script for all participants, making it difficult to determine who signed a given transaction. This improves the privacy of Bitcoin’s multi-signature functionality.
- Reduced transaction size: Taproot transactions would be smaller than traditional multi-signature transactions, resulting in lower transaction fees and faster confirmation times.
- Increased security: Taproot uses a technique called “MAST” (Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees), which allows the creation of a more space-efficient smart contract; it needs fewer data to be stored on-chain, reducing the attack surface.
- Simplification: Taproot would simplify the process of creating multi-signature transactions and smart contracts by allowing them to be represented as a single public key, making creating and managing them more user-friendly.
The benefits of Taproot are mainly focused on its ability to improve multi-sig functionality and make it more privacy-enhancing and more efficient for the bitcoin network. But it also could open ways for new smart contracts not possible before. Taproot makes the Bitcoin network more versatile and adaptable to different use cases.