On the home stretch: These Bitcoin miners support Taproot

15 percent of miners are already signaling their support for Taproot. Which hurdles still have to be overcome.

Bitcoin could soon become leaner and more scalable. Because it looks like a long-awaited software update from Bitcoin Core is heading towards the home straight. We’re talking about taproot, of course. If by the end of the Difficulty Adjustment over 90 percent of the mining nodes signal their consent to the software update, the soft fork is expected to be implemented in November of this year. If not, the game will start over in about nine days after the next Difficulty Adjustment. This signaling mechanism, also known as the Speedy Trial, is new and arose from the lessons of previous core updates, which were characterized by blatant coordination difficulties among the various stakeholder groups.

The so-called “signaling rate” is currently only 15 percent. Only 39 out of 297 Bitcoin blocks in the current difficulty period have indicated their support. Among the supporters, however, are well-known mining pools such as F2Pool, which alone holds around 18 percent of the hash rate.

Overall, however, outweighs the skepticism towards the update. On taproot.watch one can follow the adoption of Taproot.

The update is activated when more than 90 percent of the mining nodes signal their support for Taproot within the current Difficulty Adjustment. The green blocks are from mining pools that support Taproot.

Bitcoiners are pro-taproot

On Bitcoin Twitter, you also use green squares in the name to signal your support for the update, which is popular in the community. After all, Bitcoiners are predominantly considered to be Taproot’s supporters; only the miners can still be asked. In order for the soft fork to slide into the log as smoothly as possible, it is helpful if the mining nodes agree.

If necessary, Taproot could also come into the system via User Activated Soft Fork (UASF). That would be the second time. Because SegWit was also implemented against the resistance of the miners. At that time, the majority of Bitcoiners rebelled against update attempts that wanted to double the block size to 4 MB by not installing the corresponding code. Instead, full node owners only updated on SegWit.