Taproot vs. Security Threats. Bitcoin Tech Talk #267

Jameson Lopp wrote an article in Forbes about the different security threats to holding Bitcoin. By his reckoning, the biggest threats are accidental loss, digital theft, government seizure, physical theft and inheritance planning. I’ve been writing code to upgrade the buidl-python library to have Taproot support, so I read the article with some of the possible improvements in mind. After reading, I came to the realization that Taproot helps in each of these security threats.

The biggest problem, by Jameson’s reckoning is accidental loss. Usually, wallets have some seed phrase that you can back up. This can be done digitally, on paper, on steel or even in your brain. But what if you lose both the wallet and the seed phrase? Is there a way to still access your coins?

With enough foresight and planning, it turns out that you can add additional backup options. Taproot has, in addition to the normal single-key spend, an option to add a whole set of different scripts that can also spend, called scriptspends. This means wallets can now give users more recovery options.