The Bitcoin Improvement Proposals 340 through 342 were merged into the Bitcoin codebase on Thursday, signaling that the anticipated Taproot upgrade is ready. Taproot and the associated technology of Schnorr signatures are considered to be the most important upgrade for Bitcoin in the past year. It is primarily a privacy improvement for complex spending conditions on Bitcoin like multisig transactions, time locks and other conditions based on Bitcoin Script. As Cointelegraph reported previously, Taproot hides every additional spending condition beyond the one that was activated. For example, a transaction might be executed immediately if all four multisig signers agree, or …

The Taproot upgrade represents one of the most significant developments for Bitcoin’s mainchain in recent months. Despite seeing very little controversy, the community is still debating on the proper procedure on how to implement it more than six months after the BIPs were published. The issues stem from the necessity of conducting a soft fork that would be accepted by all relevant stakeholders. According to a Reddit thread pinned in the r/Bitcoin community, “the biggest problem with activating Taproot is PTSD from the previous softfork, SegWit.” History of SegWit SegWit consensus in 2017 followed the BIP9 soft-fork procedure, which required …

Steem has executed a soft fork to restrict the rogue “community321” account from making transfers after the account sent nearly 24 million STEEM to Bittrex in protest of a hard fork that sought to freeze the funds. While Steem has claimed that the hard fork was intended to protect the Steem community against malicious actors, critics claim it was intended to punish supporters of the Hive hard fork by freezing their funds. Steem sanctions community321 An update posted to Steemit on May 22 announced the completion of a soft fork sanctioning community321, stating that “the community no longer has control …

Tensions between Steem (STEEM) and the Hive (HIVE) community continue to escalate, with Steem executing a soft fork to freeze up to 20 accounts owned by the network’s former witnesses. The frozen accounts hold 17.6 million STEEM, worth approximately $3.2 million and equating to nearly 5% of Steem’s total supply. On April 4, the soft fork was proposed in a Steemit post authored by the new account "softfork2288." In response to the purported “uncertain threat that the leaders and main influencers of [Hive] represented to the Steem Blockchain,” the fork sanctioned roughly “no more than 20 accounts “ that meet …

CEO Nevin Freeman of stablecoin startup Reserve predicts that central banks will tokenize their currency at some point, but stablecoins will likely still have an advantage in offering privacy. Freeman delivered his remarks at the Consensus 2019 panel “The End of Volatility? Stablecoins on the Rise” on May 15. During the panel, moderator Joel Telpner, a partner at Sullivan & Worcester LLP, asked the speakers why banks could not simply tokenize their national currency and drive fiat-backed stablecoin services out of business. Freeman replied that he thinks banks will do this, but will not offer the same privacy of current …

Bitcoin (BTC) developer Pieter Wuille has unveiled two proposals on GitHub for a Taproot soft fork in a message to the bitcoin-dev mailing list on May 6. Taproot is a solution that aims to combine the advantages of Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree (MAST) and the Schnorr signature scheme in order to reveal less information after a bitcoin transaction takes place. MAST allows for the alternative possibilities of how a bitcoin transaction could have occurred to remain private, and Schnorr allows for a MAST-enabled transaction to occur without revealing that MAST was used to check transaction conditions. In Wuille’s memo, he …

Charlie Lee, Litecoin’s (LTC) creator, declared that he will focus on making the major cryptocurrency more fungible in a tweet Jan. 28. Lee stated in the tweet that “fungibility is the only property of sound money that is missing from Bitcoin & Litecoin,” adding that “the next battleground will be on fungibility and privacy.” The tweet’s conclusion is that the developer wants to zero in on implementing private transactions in Litecoin, stating: “I am now focused on making Litecoin more fungible by adding Confidential Transactions.” In reply to another tweet in the same thread, Lee explained that confidential transactions could …

Bitcoin (BTC) protocol developer Mark Friedenbach introduced a method for Bitcoin scaling he claims will not require a hard fork at a workshop in Tokyo October 5. The new concept presented at the Scaling Bitcoin workshop, entitled “Forward Blocks,” suggests a major on-chain capacity boost by means of a Proof-of-Work (PoW) alternation that is done as a soft fork, combined with use of alternative private ledgers. The proposal describes a method for scaling that claims to be able to increase “settlement transaction volume to 3,584 times current levels” and improve censorship resistance via sharding. During the presentation, Friedenbach suggested major …