Introduction to Bitcoin Taproot

In this lesson we will learn about Taproot. Taproot is an update to the Bitcoin protocol released in November 2021 (block 709,632).

It consists mainly of three Bitcoin Improvement Proposals:

• BIP340: Schnorr Signatures
• BIP341: SegWit version 1 spending rules
• BIP342: Validation of Taproot Scripts

Taproot introduced Schnorr signatures alongside the existing ECDSA signatures. Schnorr signatures allow easy aggregation of keys for signatures, and also allow keys to be “tweaked” in order to commit to a script. We will explore what tweaking is and where it is needed later.

Taproot also introduced MAST (Merkelized Alternative Script Trees), a data structure that allows you to commit to multiple output conditions without revealing them beforehand.

Taproot provides more ways to create spending conditions and improves privacy for bitcoin. The following resources can help you learn more about Bitcoin:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ-ioCO4S_w
• https://dev.to/eunovo/a-guide-to-creating-taproot-scripts-with-bitcoinjs-lib-4oph
• https://lightning.engineering/posts/2023-04-19-taproot-musig2-recap/
• https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0341.mediawiki#user-content-Taproot_key_path_spending_signature_validation
• https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook/tree/develop