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Take the lead in using the Signet testnet to experience the Taproot tutorial

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Taproot is about to land in November, how to experience it as an early adopter?

Original title: "Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #167"

Original author: Bitcoin Optech

Original compilation: overnight porridge, Babbitt

Taproot is one of the most important upgrades to the Bitcoin network, and starting at block 709,632 (expected in November of this year), Bitcoin users will be able to securely send and receive Taproot transactions.

How to experience Taproot first? You can use Taproot via testnet or signet testnet. Using testnet or signet makes it easier to test how your wallet interacts with other people's wallets than creating a local testnet using Bitcoin Core's regtest mode.

In this article, we will use Bitcoin Core's built-in wallet to receive and spend a Taproot transaction on signet. You should be able to adjust these commands to test incoming and outgoing payments between your own wallet and Bitcoin Core.

Although it is technically possible to receive and spend Taproot transactions using the built-in wallet in Bitcoin Core 22.0, we recommend that you instead construct a Bitcoin Core pull request < a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/22364" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">#22364, which makes taproot a descriptor wallet‌. After the build is complete, enable signet:

If this is your first time using signet, you will need to sync Its blockchain (which currently contains less than 200 MB of data), takes about a minute or so to complete the synchronization (you can use getblockchaininfo RPC to monitor the synchronization progress). After the synchronization is complete, create a descriptor wallet:

now , you can create a bech32m address:

Yes With this address, you can apply for a "credential" for testing from signet faucet‌ . You then need to wait for confirmation, which will take about 30 minutes (or sometimes longer). If you look at the transaction, you'll notice the P2TR script you created.

You can then create a second bech32m address , and send funds there to test the payout.

For this spend we can look at one of the inputs and see that its witness contains only A 64-byte signature. If this were a P2WPKH spend or any other type of old Bitcoin spend, the required witness would be much larger.