What is Taproot and how will it benefit the Bitcoin? Jimmy Song Clarifies to Jean Rausis that it is important for people to understand Taproot and what it has to do with Bitcoin Ecosystem. Many consider Tap Root to be the biggest update to bitcoin to-date – even bigger than Segwit.

For clarity, SegWit is the process by which the block size limit on a blockchain is increased by removing signature data from bitcoin transactions. Segregated witness, in short, means to separate transaction signatures.

Most people talk about Tap Root, but they don’t know that there are actually 3 BIPs (Bitcoin Improvement Proposals) included in the taproot.

A Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) is a formal proposal to change Bitcoin. The BIP process organizes the Bitcoin community in the absence of a centralized leader. BIPs can propose changes to Bitcoin’s consensus layer, community standards, or the development process.

As a piece of software bitcoin is always undergoing upgrades. Bugs need to be fixed.  Algorithms can be made more efficient.  Code can be simplified. Compatibility with other software must be maintained. And, new features can be added. In the case of normal software belonging to centralized projects. A manager or lead developer simply assigns tasks that needs changes to be implemented.

There are 3 different BIPS:  Standards Track BIPs – Changes to the network protocol, block or transaction validation, or anything affecting interoperability. Informational BIPs – Design issues, general guidelines. Process BIPs – Describes or proposes a change in process.

BIP-341 is the Taproot.  BIP: 341; Layer: Consensus (soft fork; Title: Taproot: SegWit version 1 spending rules; Author: Pieter Wuille.

Schnorr signatures is an algorithm that allows you to add different public keys or signatures together to create a new signature that is a combination of all the three, four or five signatures you have together. And, that was not possible before. And that allows you to enable Taproot.

Is it fair to say that you cannot have Taproot without Schnorr signatures? You could have had Taproot without Schnorr Signatures, but combining them actually gives you a lot of different stuff.  The way I would characterize Schnorr is it is a different signature algorithm. And, it has other sort of property that ECDSA does not have.

What you are talking about is signature and Pub Key aggregation.  There is also something called Batch verification and you could verify by 1000 signatures at one signatures at a time which kind of forces you with ECDSA.

When a node receives a new block, it normally verifies every transaction and signature in that block one by one. This is a time consuming and resource intensive process. Key aggregation permits Bitcoin nodes to verify signatures in batches. This method significantly reduces the time and compute power required to verify a transaction with many inputs.

Would Taproot be able to scale and enhance privacy without Schnorr?  You will definitely have the privacy aspect with Taproot.  What Schnorr gives you is additional sort of ways to get privacy as well. Because you can’t tell if it is a single signature or multi signature, just by looking at the public key. You can do signature and pub key aggregation.