The privacy-focused modification will allow every use of the protocol to be encoded as a single public key and single signature, which allows for other actions to be hidden inside seemingly ordinary code.
The upgrade merged into Bitcoin Core late last year, and the node software allowing miners to signal support for the upgrade with hash power was released in March.
In the case of Taproot, consensus must occur within 10 epochs or else developers will have to pursue a different activation strategy, potentially a user-activated soft fork.
It’s very unlikely that enough mining pools will signal during this first difficulty epoch, since only 30% of blocks are signaling at the moment.
But many pools that previously said they were committed to deploying Taproot have yet to signal.
The holiday is observed from May 1 to May 5 in China, meaning all the mining pools that had previously committed were essentially out of office on the first days of signaling.
De La Torre said Poolin has to upgrade firmware for some machines in its pool since the current firmware doesn’t allow signaling.
Even with roadblocks, De La Torre said he’s expecting the consensus to occur within the coming two difficulty epochs.
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