Taproot is Locked! Don’t understand what that means and at this point you’re too afraid to ask?

Aaron van Wirdum posted a bunch of his articles about Taproot. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1403701284495110145.html

Don't understand what Taproot lock-in means and at this point you're too afraid to ask?

Here's a thread with all my Taproot and Taproot activation articles so far 👇

— Aaron van Wirdum (@AaronvanW) June 12, 2021

For years now, Bitcoin developers have been wanting to implement Schnorr signatures on the Bitcoin protocol.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-power-of-schnorr-the-signature-algorithm-to-increase-bitcoin-s-scale-and-privacy-1460642496

Among other things, Schnorr signatures would enable a new type of smart contracts, sometimes referred to as Scriptless Scripts.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/scriptless-scripts-how-bitcoin-can-support-smart-contracts-without-smart-contracts

Meanwhile, Bitcoin developers were also thinking about a trick called MAST (Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees), which would make smart contracts on Bitcoin more compact.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/the-next-step-to-improve-bitcoin-s-flexibility-scalability-and-privacy-is-called-mast-1476388597

Bitcoin Core contributor Gregory Maxwell then figured out how to combine Schnorr and MAST in a clever way to not only make smart contracts more compact, but in many cases also indistinguishable from regular transactions, benefitting privacy: Taproot.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/taproot-coming-what-it-and-how-it-will-benefit-bitcoin

After years of development, the Taproot code was ready to be activated. This marked the start of a new discussion: how should the upgrade be deployed on the Bitcoin network as safely as possible?

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/bip-8-bip-9-or-modern-soft-fork-activation-how-bitcoin-could-upgrade-next

Interestingly, some miners also took the initiative to get Taproot in the Bitcoin protocol, with @officialpoolin‘s @bitentrepreneur collecting positive feedback from a range of mining pools on taprootactivation.com.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/poolin-launches-initiative-to-activate-taproot-encouraging-other-mining-pools-to-join

https://taprootactivation.com/

Still, there were roughly to “camps” in the Bitcoin activation debate, that for a while seemed unable to reach consensus on the best method: LOT=false or LOT=true.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/lottrue-or-lotfalse-this-is-the-last-hurdle-before-taproot-activation

This apparent deadlock was eventually broken when Bitcoin Core contributor Russell O’Connor proposed an activation method called Speedy Trial.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/there-are-now-two-taproot-activation-clients-heres-why

Today, Bitcoin miners locked in Taproot using miner signaling, as defined in Speedy Trial.

Bitcoin is upgrading. Congrats everyone!

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/taproot-locks-in

Finally, as a neat example of something new that could soon benefit from the Taproot upgrade, several Bitcoin developers have been speculating about a concept known as Payment Pools:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/building-on-taproot-payment-pools-could-be-bitcoins-next-layer-two-protocol