Smart Contracts.... the irony... but a needed step to move forward...
Plus:
An article from coindesk does a good job explaining further improvements:
Other Taproot improvements
Carman and his colleagues at Suredbits have been working on discrete log contracts (DLCs), a fairly new smart contract logic for Bitcoin that, while working today, will be more flexible and easier to use when Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade kicks in.
Belcher told CoinDesk that Schnorr signatures will also enable “batched validation” wherein a Bitcoin full node could “validate 1,000 Taproot signatures in nearly the same time it takes to validate one [ECDSA] signature.” This scaling solution would significantly speed the time it takes a node to verify all signatures in a block.
Additionally, Taproot could use “ring signatures” to give users the ability to prove they own certain coins without having to reveal the public key associated with those coins.
Read more: Bitcoin Miners, Developers Narrow Down How Taproot Will Be Activated
“That means someone could prove that they own a certain coin without revealing which exact coin. For example, it would be possible to prove you own at least 1 BTC (or any amount) by doing a ring signature over all the Taproot [unspent transactions] worth more than 1 BTC, and yet it doesn't actually reveal which is yours,” Belcher said.
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