Bitcoin’s Privacy and Scaling Tech Upgrade ‘Taproot’ Just Took a Big Step Forward

A privacy and scalability upgrade that could turn out to be one of bitcoin’s largest to date has passed a couple of milestones that were little noticed outside technical circles. 

On Tuesday, Pieter Wuille, a Bitcoin Core contributor and the brains behind the update known as Taproot submitted a work-in-progress code change to GitHub in what’s known as a “pull request,” showing that the code is ready for more developer eyes. 

“Merging this is obviously conditional on getting community support for the proposal. It’s opened here to demonstrate the code changes that it would imply,” he wrote.

Submitting a pull request to the code for Bitcoin Core (the reference implementation, or standard version of bitcoin software from which others are derived) does not mean the change is official. But it’s a key step. While many in the bitcoin community are excited about the upgrade, the process of turning the idea into code has been mostly happening behind-the-scenes. Wuille’s “pull request” pushes…