Bitcoin Explained - The Technical Side of Bitcoin

Aaron and Sjors discuss what's new in Bitcoin Core v30

Aaron and Sjors discuss the proposal to remove the OP_RETURN limit from Bitcoin Core. This episode’s sponsor: CoinKite, maker of the ColdCard. Aaron’s Nostr: ⁠npub1art8cs66ffvnqns5zs5qa9fwlctmusj5lj38j94lv0ulw0j54wjqhpm0w5⁠ Sjors’ Nostr: ⁠nprofile1qyvhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnnwpex7an0daehgtnwdshsqgyxsh477ejn8rwkjv0zen0ncxwe7rj6zpnujx8j9ecgrsj43786lqyul0f2

Aaron and Sjors talk about the new Bitcoin Core 29.0 release. .=== This episode’s sponsor: CoinKite, maker of the ColdCard. Aaron’s Nostr: ⁠npub1art8cs66ffvnqns5zs5qa9fwlctmusj5lj38j94lv0ulw0j54wjqhpm0w5⁠ Sjors’ Nostr: ⁠nprofile1qyvhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnnwpex7an0daehgtnwdshsqgyxsh477ejn8rwkjv0zen0ncxwe7rj6zpnujx8j9ecgrsj43786lqyul0f2

Stratum v2, DATUM, Bitaxe, P2Pool and friends. In Bitcoin, Explained 96, Aaron and Sjors discuss some recent innovations in mining, and in particular mining decentralization. Specifically, they discuss the Stratum V2 and DATUM mining protocols to decentralize transaction selection in mining pools, the open source hardware Bitaxe miner, and some recent proposals to make decentralized mining pools l...

In Bitcoin, Explained 95, Aaron and Sjors discuss the new Bitcoin Core 28.0 release. Specifically, they cover upgrades to Bitcoin’s testnet (testnet 4), new mempool policies, full RBF integration, the introduction of assume UTXO, improved wallet migration support and the implementation of block file XOR. https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/ Release notes: https://bitcoincore.org/en/releases/28.0/...

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors welcome Ruben Somsen and Josie to the show to discuss BIP 352, their now-finalized Bitcoin Improvement Proposal for Silent Payments. As previously discussed in episode 58, Silent Payments use a special type of addresses that allow senders to generate public keys for transaction recipients, in such a way that these recipients can in turn genera...

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors discuss the Great Consensus Cleanup Revival soft fork(s). This proposal would fix some known bugs in the Bitcoin protocol, specifically the timewarp vulnerability, large block validation times, 64 byte transactions and BIP 30 verification. Sjors also provides a quick update on the court case against Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev, and p...

In this episode of  Bitcoin, Explained , Aaron and Sjors explain what new features are included in the upcoming Bitcoin Core 27.0 release. https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoin-devwiki/wiki/27.0-Release-Candidate-Testing-Guide === This episode’s sponsor:  ⁠⁠⁠⁠CoinKite⁠⁠⁠⁠ , maker of the ColdCard Aaron's Twitter:  ⁠⁠⁠⁠@AaronvanW⁠⁠⁠⁠ Aaron’s Nostr: npub1art8cs66ffvnqns5zs5qa9fwlctmusj5lj38j94l...

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors are once more joined by Breez developer Jesse de Wit, this time to explain splicing. Splicing allows users of the Lightning Network to effectively add or remove funds from an active channel, allowing for continuous payment and routing activity. Aaron, Sjors and Jesse discuss what challenges this entails, and how these challenges are overcome....

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors are joined by Breez developer Jesse de Wit to discuss asynchronous lightning payments. They explain why such payments would be useful, how they would work, and what building blocks are required to realize it. In the process, Aaron, Sjors and Jesse also cover the basics of PTLCs and Trampoline Payments. === This episode’s sponsor:  ⁠⁠CoinKite⁠⁠...

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors discuss two more electronic cash projects that predate Bitcoin: Wei Dai’s b-money and Hal Finney’s RPOW. As detailed in Aaron’s new book, The Genesis Book, these systems introduced design elements that were later utilized by Satoshi Nakamoto. Aaron and Sjors explain what these elements are, and how the inspired Bitcoin’s design. To buy Aaron’s...

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors discuss two electronic cash projects that predate Bitcoin: Adam Back’s Hashcash and Nick Szabo’s Bit Gold. As detailed in Aaron’s new book, The Genesis Book, these systems introduced design element that were later utilized by Satoshi Nakamoto. Aaron and Sjors explain what these elements are, and how they inspired Bitcoin’s design. To buy Aaron...

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors discuss the so-called “block 1,983,702 problem”. They explain how a bug in early Bitcoin implementations could in rare cases cause a loss of funds, or in a worst-case scenario even lead to consensus failures, while they also explain how BIP 30 and BIP 34 solved this problem. As it turns out, however, BIP 34 introduced a new problem, that could...



In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors explain what features are offered by Ocean , the relaunched and rebranded Eligius mining pool. They discuss how payouts from this pool are (partially) non-custodial, how the block template creation is fully transparent, and how payout distribution is determined. Aaron and Sjors also briefly touch on the "spam" filtering employed by...

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors explain what new features are included in the upcoming Bitcoin Core 0.26 release. They also briefly discuss recent developments concerning the transaction inclusion policy of mining pool F2Pool, which appears to have been compliant with the OFAC sanctions list. Link to testing guide: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoin-devwiki/wiki/26.0-Re...



In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors discuss an invalid block mined by Marathon Pool. They explain why the block was invalid, what caused it (and what didn’t), and why that didn’t affect the Bitcoin network.

 Aaron and Sjors also provide some updates about the show, and what that means moving forward.

 Finally, Sjors briefly mentions some notable Bitcoin Core updates that wer...

In this episode, Aaron (@AaronvanW) and Sjors (@provoost) discuss a vulnerability in Libbitcoin dubbed “Milk Sad”, which allowed people to generate private key seeds with such weak entropy that their private keys could be brute forced and their coins stolen. Aaron and Sjors examine how this vulnerability (could have) ended up in Libbitcoin as well as in Andreas Antonopoulos’ book  Mastering Bitcoi...

In this episode, Aaron (@AaronvanW) and Sjors (@provoost) discuss a recent blog post by Bitcoin Core developer Anthony Towns (@ajtowns), “Putting the B in BTC”, in which he outlines a vision for scaling Bitcoin to facilitate billions of users. As Aaron and Sjors walk through the article, they explain what some of Towns’ proposed solutions are, and which tradeoffs they entail. Link to the blog post...

In this episode, Aaron (@AaronvanW) and Sjors (@provoost) discuss Bitcoin Core 25.0, the latest major release of the Bitcoin Core software. They highlight four of the most notable changes: performance improvements concerning huge transaction loads, further Miniscript integration, a faster wallet re-scan, and the decreased 65-byte transaction limit policy rule. For further reading on the reasoning...

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron (@AaronvanW) and Sjors (@provoost) are joined by Braiins co-founder Jan Čapek (@janbraiins), who has been leading the initiative to upgrade pooled mining to the Stratum V2 protocol. Aaron, Sjors and Jan discuss what pooled mining is, how the Stratum protocol helps with that, and in what ways Stratum V2 is an improvement over Stratum V1. Episode Sponsor:...

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron (@AaronvanW) and Sjors (@provoost) explain why the witness discount was included in the Segregated Witness protocol upgrade from 2017, why this discount is 75%, and why this discount still makes sense in today’s world where Inscriptions benefit from it. Episode Sponsor: https://voltage.cloud/ Sjors New Book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Technical-inno...

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron (@AaronvanW) and Sjors (@provoost) explain Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBTs), discussing what problems they solve, how they work, and some of the ways they are used. In the last part of the episode, the hosts zoom in on one particular PSBT use case called Dutch Auctions, which Bitcoin Magazine recently used to sell ordinals. Episode Sponsor:...

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors discuss BIP 324, the proposal by Dhruv, Pieter Wuille and Tim Ruffing to add peer-to-peer (P2P) encryption to the Bitcoin protocol. They explain why this is needed, how it would work, and which problems it would, and wouldn’t solve. Episode Sponsor: https://voltage.cloud/ Sjors New Book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Technical-innovations-Sjo...

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors explain Stamps, a new(?) protocol to upload images onto the Bitcoin blockchain, which end up in the UTXO set. To learn more about some of the concepts mentioned in this episode, also check out episode 15 (Utreexo), episode 61 (OP_RETURN), episode 72 (Inscriptions) and episode 75 (Multisig). Episode Sponsor: https://voltage.cloud/ Sjors New Boo...

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors discuss multi-signature (multisig), and the various ways that Bitcoin enables multisig; from bare multisig, to P2SH, SegWit, Taproot, and finally Musig, as well as some potential future solutions. Episode Sponsor: https://voltage.cloud/ Sjors New Book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Technical-innovations-Sjors-Provoost/dp/9090360425 Don't...