PSA. With taproot locked in, it is a good idea to upgrade your full nodes to Bitcoin Core 0.21.1

With taproot officially locked in since the last difficulty adjustment:

bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo "taproot": { "type": "bip9", "bip9": { "status": "locked_in", "start_time": 1619222400, "timeout": 1628640000, "since": 687456, "min_activation_height": 709632 }, "active": false } 

and active from block 709632, it is a good idea to upgrade the full node to 0.21.1 since it is the first version fully supporting taproot. Version 0.21.0 had taproot coded but no knowledge about the activation mechanism.

The final activation will not happen until November but it's now time to be prepared. If you don't upgrade, the old nodes will consider the taproot transactions as "anyone-can-spend" so they will continue to work but without validating their correctness.

It is also a good idea to upgrade wallets to versions that support new taproot bech32m address format.

For example, Electrum wallet supports bech32m since version 4.1.0.