In 2016, the code was finalized, but a significant contingent of miners refused to upgrade because Segwit would cut into their transaction revenue. Bitcoin users forced miners’ hands by threatening a user activate soft fork, a scenario where active node users would adopt Segwit and blacklist blocks from any miners who hadn’t upgraded to it. The holdouts buckled and eventually adopted the upgrade.

The more recent Taproot was a more straightforward upgrade that didn’t see much opposition (if any). Still, to avoid another game of chicken like with Segwit, Bitcoin Core developers devised a polling method called Speedy Trial to gauge mining pool support for Taproot.

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One criticism of Speedy Trial accused it of relying too much on a single sector of the Bitcoin ecosystem (Bitcoin mining) to decide on whether or not to move forward with the upgrade. Indeed, mining pool operators were asked to vote yes or no with Speedy Trial, but the individual miners themselves were left largely out of the loop.

Luxor took issue with how little time miners had to learn about Taproot before the signaling period started. This did not leave enough time for our miners to educate themselves on the proposed upgrade and voice any feedback or concerns. Indeed, in Taproot as in other upgrades, mining pools were treated as stand-ins for their entire client base, with no time nor processes in place to elicit educated opinions from their miners.

Luxor is committed to liaising between Bitcoin miners and core developers so that our miners can better understand the ins-and-outs of future upgrades and a Bitcoin miner’s role, if any, in bringing them to fruition.

Our approach entails four stages: (1) Education, (2) Feedback, (3) Financial Support and (4) Signaling Support.

As Bitcoin’s network grows beyond hundreds of millions of people, it will be critical to distill these technical changes into clear, layman’s language for Bitcoin’s expanding base of involved users. We may need to do this sooner rather than later, with Taproot and its Schnorr Signatures paving the way for future improvements to Bitcoin.