Bitcoin’s Taproot Privacy Tech Is Ready – But One Thing’s Standing In The Way

Bitcoin’s privacy is pretty abysmal – after all, what else can you say when anyone in the world can look up any transaction using a web explorer?

But while that’s the case today, developers have long been trying to find a fix, or at least improve it over time. One of bitcoin’s most famous developers, Greg Maxwell, even aroused quite a bit of interest when he proposed something called Taproot back in January.

Far from providing full bitcoin privacy, Taproot’s code offers a way to make all transactions on the blockchain look the same to outsiders. Still, chatter about the proposal has arguably faded as other projects caught the community’s eye and bitcoin’s price tumbled.

Among those who haven’t forgotten about the proposal, though, are bitcoin’s developers, as plenty of toiling has been going on behind the scenes. Mathematician Andrew Poelstra pulled together a mathematical security proof in April, while Xapo engineer and Bitcoin Core contributor Anthony Towns put forward an…