Ethan Buchman, Co-founder of Cosmos in this Twitter handle, expressed:  Lots of folks think Bitcoin governance is dead and the protocol ossified. They are going to be very surprised in the next year when Bitcoin gets a significant upgrade. Bitcoin moves slowly, as it should, but it does move. Taproot is a fantastic feat of protocol governance and social consensus.

Taproot is a big deal for the bitcoin network, especially as it relates to smart contracts.

Coindesk recently published a content:  “When Will Bitcoin’s Taproot Upgrade ‘Lock In’? With 94% of Bitcoin’s hash rate now signaling for the upgrade, it should lock in during the next difficulty period.”

Colin Harper wrote:  “Taproot now has more than the required minimum of miners signaling support to lock in the upgrade, but the upgrade isn’t a shoe-in just yet.  Per the activation rules set by Speedy Trial, about 90% of the blocks mined within one of Bitcoin’s difficulty periods will need to signal support for the upgrade for it to be locked in for activation in November.”

There is a lot of attention to the issues with PoW of late, and here is why for those who are not acquainted with the basics.

The enormous amounts of electricity used to run the networks are indispensable in PoW. Mining new coins take a lot of computing power because of the Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm.  The idea was first introduced in 1993 to combat spam emails and was formally called, Proof of work in 1997; however, the technique went largely unused until Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin 2009. He realized that this mechanism could be used to reach a consensus between many nodes on a network. And he used it as a way to secure blockchain.

However, the Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm works by having all nodes solve a cryptographic puzzle. This puzzle is solved by miners. And the first one to find a solution gets the miner reward. And, this has led to a situation where people are building larger and larger mining farms leading to huge electricity consumption.

Apart from power consumption, nodes with better equipment and power on the network get more work. And those who create more block get the miner reward. To increase the chance of getting the work to solve the puzzle miners get together to form the mining pool. They combine their hashing power and distribute the awards evenly across everyone in the pool.

So, to sum it up, Proof of work is causing miners to use massive amounts of electricity, and it encourages the use of mining pools which makes the blockchain more centralized as opposed to decentralized. To solve this issue, they come up with a new consensus mechanism which is as effective and better as Proof of work.

Not only PoS, but many other systems are also getting proposed to push BTC out of the ring ultimately.