28 Jun 2021
The road to meaningful Taproot adoption
Taproot is a significant upgrade for bitcoin, but it will take a long time to realize its benefits at scale. Related: it’s been ~4 years since the implementation of SegWit, and we only just recently crossed 70% SegWit usage.
There is some speculation that blockchain-dot-com’s wallet finally having upgraded to SegWit is the force behind the recent surge.Several developers have speculated that they take up ~30% of the block space given the number of p2pkh transactions in the mempool, which might also explain why the mempool cleared for the first time in 2021 on June 2nd.That is nearly a third of all Bitcoin transactions, demonstrating how much upgrades to the Bitcoin network depend on large exchanges to incentivize new adopters.The small initial anonymity sets are a known downside of Taproot, which can turn into an upside the more Taproot gets adopted. That ultimately requires exchanges to do their part. Until then, users should not use Taproot until they are convinced that the vast economic majority enforces it.