A soft fork

There is no new chain.

Your own title is answering this, Taproot is an "update" coming to bitcoin not some shitcoin fork creating a copycoin to give you airdrop!

Not possible to know, since bitcoin is decentralized its forks always take place only after reaching majority support from the network and that can take time. But so far it has only been 16 days since the release of the new bitcoin core version that adds the code for Taproot activation and miners have started signalling. You can see the progress on a website like this: https://taproot.watch/

In many ways yes.
It is a soft fork, it is backward compatible, but it is a smaller upgrade than SegWit, It doesn't have the drama that SegWit had though, it is adding new witness version.

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

Is it known or can it be roughly calculated by how much the Taproot upgrade will increase Bitcoin't transaction capacity? Are we talking substantial increase or just a minor improvement?

Okay does this Taproot update affect bitcoin's decentralization in anyway that will bring a backlash from the btc community?

its soft.

so far no option of hard fork. and no option of a forced fork/contentious fork. (all good signs)

if it doesnt get its 90% over a 2 week period it just wont lock in/activate.
but has many 2 week oportunities over the next 3 months

so far based on the latest 1day % is at about ~85% acceptance
so i see its getting close to having met threshold (within inches so far)
so as long as pools dont pull out it could lock in within a month.
as it just needs a few more % and them to then hold it for 2 weeks+

if it does lock in, it then allows 3 further months to then upgrade software before it activates (giving users time to update)

i see no contention or malice practices by devs trying to force the issue

Elon Musk has a lot to read, he needs to tweet less and read more (this forum, maybe the technical area) before coming with wrong conclusions (again).

Bitcoin is what it is, he can't "want" anything and can't change anything anyway. The only changes are what the whole community agrees with, as you are seeing with taproot right now.


LN is for occasional fast transactions, this is not required for everything. You certainly don't need it to purchase a car online...

taproot can make LN settlement commitments cheaper.. IF the channel partners use the same subset of keys
from the same keyseed.
it works by using a RANGE instead of a point. meaning multiple keys or a mathematic average of those keys are within the range of the needed proof range

 its useful if one user wants to generate a thousand public addresses from a seed knowing that it only needs 1 signature to prove them all when spending all the funds received on those addresses

it doesnt work if people are generating keys from completely different random points unassociated with each other in any way. EG different seeds from different wallets

there might be 'some' LN utility for what is known as 'LN watchtowers/factory' services which is where there is a manager(third party) that sets up the channels on behalf of 2 users. whereby its always the watchtower/factory that is broadcasting the commitment.(lite wallet app ->manager server)
but in those cases. most of the time the factory is just aggregating balances offchain and resetting up new channels without needing to broadcast.

but in short.
it wont make LN any better. but does allow more oppertunity for managed channels(with pros and cons of that)
but mainly individuals can seed thousands of addresses and need only one signature
say for instance. exchanges/pools making batch payments

Snowden is a bit of celebrity really, not sure why we should take his opinion as being more interesting than anyone else's

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Taproot doesn't do much to improve Bitcoin privacy.

Bitcoin transactions can have optional parts in the contracts (even the simplest style of Bitcoin transaction where "Mr. A pays Mrs. B" is a basic contract, really)


With Taproot, the optional parts that don't get used aren't recorded in the blockchain. With current Bitcoin contracts, all the possible options are recorded onchain, which is a waste of space. Who cares about the parts of the contract that didn't happen?

So that's why people are saying Taproot improves privacy; it does, but it's more meaningful as a way of stopping the blockchain getting filled with useless parts of contracts.

Are all the miners agree on this TapRoot Update?

BTC Taproot plan stumbles as miners fail to show support—who holds the power?

The short answer is yes.
More than 95% of the mining pools are currently signalling support for Taproot activation. The problem is that they still haven't upgraded all their servers (each mining pool has multiple servers in different locations) with the change to signal for it so the total number of blocks signalling is a lot less.