Bitcoin Optech Podcast

Mark “Murch” Erhardt, Gustavo Flores Echaiz, and Mike Schmidt are joined by René Pickhardt and Craig Raw to discuss  ⁠Newsletter #387⁠ . News ● Bitcoin Core wallet migration bug (0:55) ● Using Ark as a channel factory (7:47) ● Draft BIP for silent payment descriptors (29:02) Releases and release candidates ● Bitcoin Core 30.2rc1 (58:34) Notable code and documentation changes ● Bitcoin Core #34156...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt, Gustavo Flores Echaiz, and Mike Schmidt are joined by Anthony Towns and Mikhail Kudinov to discuss  ⁠Newsletter #386⁠ . News ● Building a vault using blinded co-signers (1:04:09) ● Peer feature negotiation (1:40) Changing consensus ● Year 2106 timestamp overflow uint64 migration (1:07:47) ● Relax BIP54 timestamp restriction for 2106 soft fork (1:11:36) ● Understanding and mit...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Bastien Teinturier, Rearden Code, and Pieter Wuille to discuss  Newsletter #385: 2025 Year-in-Review Special . January ● Updated ChillDKG draft (43:08) ● Offchain DLCs (45:53) ● Compact block reconstructions (2:29:27) February ● Erlay update (1:53:55) ● LN ephemeral anchor scripts (0:50) ● Probabilistic payments (54:45) March ● Bitcoin Forking Gu...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt, Gustavo Flores Echaiz, and Mike Schmidt are joined by Matt Morehouse and Salvatore Ingala to discuss  ⁠Newsletter #384⁠ . News ● Critical vulnerabilities fixed in LND 0.19.0 (0:59) ● A virtualized secure enclave for hardware signing devices (21:11) Changes to services and client software ● Interactive transaction visualization tool (37:16) ● BlueWallet v7.2.2 released (38:20)...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt, Gustavo Flores Echaiz, and Mike Schmidt are joined by Moonsettler and Julian to discuss  Newsletter #383 . News ● Consensus bug in NBitcoin library (1:04) Changing consensus ● LNHANCE soft fork (24:00) ● Benchmarking the varops budget (5:09) ● SLH-DSA (SPHINCS) post-quantum signature optimizations (45:29) Releases and release candidates ● Core Lightning v25.12 (1:02:24) ● LDK...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt, Gustavo Flores Echaiz, and Mike Schmidt discuss  ⁠Newsletter #382⁠ . News ● Stats on compact block reconstructions updates (0:34) ● Motion to activate BIP3 (7:26) Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange ● Do pruned nodes store witness inscriptions? (24:27) ● Increasing probability of block hash collisions when difficulty is too high (29:33) ● What is the purpose of the i...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt, Gustavo Flores Echaiz, and Mike Schmidt are joined by Antoine Poinsot and ZmnSCPxj to discuss  Newsletter #381 . News ● Modeling stale rates by propagation delay and mining centralization (1:03) ● Private key handover for collaborative closure (30:55) Changes to services and client software ● Arkade launches (52:32) ● Mempool monitoring mobile application (55:25) ● Web-based...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by TheCharlatan to discuss  Newsletter #380 . Releases and release candidates ● LND 0.20.0-beta.rc4 (1:30) Notable code and documentation changes ● Bitcoin Core #30595 (2:56) ● Bitcoin Core #33443 (28:03) ● Core Lightning #8656 (29:42) ● Core Lightning #8671 (30:22) ● LDK #4204 (33:09) ● BIPs #2022 (34:45)

Mark “Murch” Erhardt, Gustavo Flores Echaiz, and Mike Schmidt are joined by Sebastian Falbesoner, PortlandHODL, Tadge Dryja, and Antoine Poinsot to discuss  Newsletter #379 . News ● Comparing performance of ECDSA signature validation in OpenSSL vs. libsecp256k1 (1:47) Changing consensus ● Multiple discussions about restricting data (14:05) ● Post-quantum signature aggregation (1:00:05) ● Native ST...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt discuss  Newsletter #378 . News ● CPU DoS from unconfirmed transaction processing (1:00) Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange ● Why was -datacarriersize redefined in 2022, and why was the 2023 proposal to expand it not merged? (17:53) ● What is the smallest valid transaction that can be included in a block? (22:59) ● Why does Bitcoin Core continue to g...

Gustavo Flores Echaiz and Mike Schmidt are joined by Abubakar Sadiq Ismail and Carla Kirk-Cohen to discuss  ⁠Newsletter #377⁠ . News ● Detecting block template feerate increases using cluster mempool (1:06) ● Channel jamming mitigation simulation results and updates (9:28) Changes to services and client software ● BULL wallet launches (37:22) ● Sparrow 2.3.0 released (39:40) Releases and release c...

Gustavo Flores Echaiz and Mike Schmidt are joined by Francesco Madonna and supertestnet to discuss  Newsletter #376 . News ● Continued discussion of block template sharing (17:30) ● B-SSL a Secure Bitcoin Signing Layer (2:54) Releases and release candidates ● Bitcoin Core 30.0 (22:32) ● Bitcoin Core 29.2 (28:44) ● LDK 0.1.6 (29:37) Notable code and documentation changes ● Eclair #3184 (30:59) ● Co...

Gustavo Flores Echaiz and Mike Schmidt are joined by Sindura Saraswathi, ZmnSCPxj, and Eugene Siegel to discuss  ⁠Newsletter #375⁠ . News ● Optimal Threshold Signatures (1:56) ● Flattening certain nested threshold signatures (14:33) ● Theoretical limitations on embedding data in the UTXO set (38:14) Bitcoin Core PR Review Club ● Compact block harness (27:12) Releases and release candidates ● Bitco...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Gustavo Flores Echaiz to discuss  Newsletter #374 . Changing consensus ● Draft BIPs for Script Restoration (0:40) Releases and release candidates ● Bitcoin Core 30.0rc2 (19:19) ● bdk-wallet 2.2.0 (23:39) ● LND v0.20.0-beta.rc1 (24:15) Notable code and documentation changes ● Bitcoin Core #33229 (25:03) ● Bitcoin Core #33446 (26:55) ● LDK #3838 (2...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Matt Morehouse, Daniela Brozzoni, and Gustavo Flores Echaiz to discuss  Newsletter #373 . News ● Eclair vulnerability (18:50) ● Research into feerate settings (0:35) Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange ● Implications of OP_RETURN changes in upcoming Bitcoin Core version 30.0? (28:27) ● If OP_RETURN relay limits are ineffective, why remov...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by ZmnSCPxj and Constantine Doumanidis to discuss  Newsletter #372 . News ● LSP-funded redundant overpayments (16:24) ● Partitioning and eclipse attacks using BGP interception (1:02) Changes to services and client software ● Zero-knowledge proof of reserve tool (13:49) ● Alternative submarine swap protocol proof of concept (15:12) Releases and relea...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Jonas Nick and Bastien Teinturier to discuss  Newsletter #370 . News ● Provable Cryptography Workbook (0:48) Releases and release candidates ● Bitcoin Core 29.1 (10:48) ● Eclair v0.13.0 (11:17) ● Bitcoin Core 30.0rc1 (25:27) Notable code and documentation changes ● Bitcoin Core #30469 (33:18) ● Eclair #3163 (33:18) ● Eclair #2308 (40:27) ● Eclair...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Russell O’Connor, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, and Jeremy Rubin to discuss  Newsletter #370 . Changing consensus ● Details about the design of Simplicity (37:56) ● Draft BIP for adding elliptic curve operations to tapscript (1:52) ● Draft BIP for OP_TWEAKADD (19:23) Releases and release candidates ● Core Lightning v25.09 (59:40) ● Bitcoin Core 29.1rc2 (1:...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt discuss  Newsletter #368 . News ● Draft BIP for block template sharing (0:30) ● Trusted delegation of script evaluation (28:07) Changes to services and client software ● ZEUS v0.11.3 released (33:07) ● Rust Utreexo resources (33:25) ● Peer-observer tooling and call to action (34:11) ● Bitcoin Core Kernel-based node announced (37:22) ● SimplicityHL released (38...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Bruno Garcia and Liam Eagen to discuss  Newsletter #369 . News ● Update on differential fuzzing of Bitcoin and LN implementations (24:56) ● Garbled locks for accountable computing contracts (0:58) Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange ● Is it possible to recover a private key from an aggregate public key under strong assumptions? (39:45) ●...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt discuss  ⁠Newsletter #367⁠ . Releases and release candidates ● LND v0.19.3-beta.rc1 (0:19) ● Bitcoin Core 29.1rc1 (0:46) Notable code and documentation changes ● Bitcoin Core #33050 (2:38) ● Bitcoin Core #32473 (11:04) ● Bitcoin Core #33077 (17:57) ● Core Lightning #8389 (22:03)

Gloria Zhao and Mike Schmidt are joined by Tadge Dryja and Anthony Towns to discuss  ⁠Newsletter #366⁠ . News ● Draft BIPs proposed for Utreexo (1:03) ● Continued discussion about lowering the minimum relay feerate (23:43) ● Peer block template sharing to mitigate problems with divergent mempool policies (52:27) Bitcoin Core PR Review Club ● Add exportwatchonlywallet RPC to export a watchonly vers...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by David Gumberg, Lauren Shareshian, Jameson Lopp, Steven Roose, and Tim Ruffing to discuss  Newsletter #365 . News ● Testing compact block prefilling (1:13:00) ● Mempool-based fee estimation library (1:33:53) Changing consensus ● Migration from quantum-vulnerable outputs (49:17) ● Taproot-native `OP_TEMPLATEHASH` proposal (1:13) ● Proposal to allow...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Matt Morehouse and Jesse Posner to discuss  ⁠Newsletter #364⁠ . News ● LND gossip filter DoS vulnerability (0:53) ● Chain code withholding for multisig scripts (15:16) ● Research indicates common Bitcoin primitives are compatible with quantum-resistant signature algorithms (38:46) Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange ● How does Bitcoin Co...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Davidson Souza to discuss  ⁠Newsletter #363⁠ . Changes to services and client software ● Floresta v0.8.0 released (0:45) ● RGB v0.12 announced (20:38) ● FROST signing device available (25:34) ● Gemini adds taproot support (29:44) ● Electrum 4.6.0 released (38:14) Releases and release candidates ● LND v0.19.2-beta (38:51) Notable code and document...