What is the Bitcoin Taproot upgrade and what is its impact?

A key feature of the Bitcoin blockchain network (and all blockchains, for that matter) is that it is a public digital ledger, and all transaction data is publicly available. This allows Bitcoin to be fully decentralised. 

The downside of this transparency, however, is that anyone can access and extract transaction data from the network. While there are internal protocols and privacy measures in place, as well as techniques like coin mixing that one could use to conceal transaction data, they aren’t solid enough to prevent someone from acquiring and publishing it. One reason for implementing Taproot was to enhance the privacy and security of sensitive user data by allowing only essential transaction data to remain public.

Speed and performance were other issues with the Bitcoin network that Taproot aims to solve. The cryptographic signature technology that was used to record keys and signatures of transactions before Taproot had a longer commit time and took up more space on the network. The new Bitcoin Taproot signature (called Schnorr signature technology) aims to enhance speed and performance.