Bitcoin Explained - The Technical Side of Bitcoin

In this episode of “The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado,” hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost discuss the newly released Bitcoin Core 0.21.0. Bitcoin Core 0.21.0 is the 21st and latest major release of the Bitcoin Core software, the oldest and most important Bitcoin node implementation, which is often also regarded as the reference implementation for the Bitcoin protocol. Follow Aaron van Wirdum @Aaron...

In this episode of “The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado,” hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost are once again joined by Ruben Somsen. The trio discusses Drivechain, a sidechain project spearheaded by Paul Sztorc. Sidechains are alternative blockchains, where coins are pegged to bitcoin. This should make the sidechain coins interchangeable with bitcoin and therefore carry an equal value. In a way, sidech...

In this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost discuss the basics of the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s Layer 2 protocol for cheaper, faster and potentially more private transactions.

In this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors discuss why it matters that Bitcoin software is open source… and why even open source software doesn't necessarily solve all software-specific trust issues. In theory, the fact that most Bitcoin nodes, wallets and applications are open source should ensure that developers can’t include malicious code in the programs: anyone can inspect t...

In this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost discuss RSK’s shift from a federated sidechain model to the project’s new Powpeg solution. RSK is a merge mined Ethereum-like Bitcoin sidechain developed by IOVlabs. Bitcoin users can effectively move their coins to this blockchain that operates more like Ethereum, and move the coins back to the Bitcoin blockcha...

In this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost discussed Bitcoin mempools, Child Pays For Parent (CPFP) and package relay. Package relay is the project that Gloria Zhao will work on as part of her Brink fellowship, which was  announced  earlier this week, and would make the Lightning Network more robust (among other benefits). Mempools are the collections of...

In this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors discuss the Erebus Attack. The episode is a follow-up from last week’s episode on Eclipse Attacks, a type of attack that isolates a Bitcoin node by occupying all of its connection slots to block the node from receiving any transactions. Erebus Attacks are Eclipse Attacks where an attacker essentially spoofs a whole part of the internet....

In this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors discuss Eclipse attacks. More specifically, they discuss the 2015 paper “Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network,” written by Ethan Heilman, Alison Kendler, Aviv Zohar and Sharon Goldberg, from Boston University and Hebrew University/MSR Israel. Support the Show! Follow Bitcoin Magazine on Twitter @BitcoinMagazine Follow Aaron...

In this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors discuss Open Timestamps, a Bitcoin-based time stamping project by applied cryptography consultant and former Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd. Open Timestamps leverages the security of the Bitcoin blockchain to timestamp any type of data, allowing for irrefutable proof that that data existed at a particular point in time. Support the...

On this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors are once again joined by Ruben Somsen. This time, the trio doesn’t discuss one of Somsen’s own proposals, but they dive into a concept by Tadge Dryja called Utreexo.   Helpful links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y6n88DmkjU   https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoins-growing-utxo-problem-and-how-utreexo-can-help-solve-it   Support...

On this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors discuss “Assume UTXO”, a proposal and project by Chaincode Labs alumni James O’Beirne.   One of the biggest bottlenecks for scaling Bitcoin — if not the biggest one — is initial block download: the time it takes for a Bitcoin node to synchronize with the Bitcoin network, as it needs to process all historic transactions and blocks in orde...

Bitcoin Core 0.21 will support Tor v3 addresses. Aaron and Sjors explain what this means and why it matters, and also discuss how new Bitcoin nodes find existing Bitcoin nodes when they bootstrap to the network. Helpful Links: * Tor V3 (onion) address support in Bitcoin Core: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/19954 * the ADDRv2 message added in BIP155 that allows nodes to gossip those new To...

In this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Ruben Somsen returns to explain his proposal to combine blind merged mining and perpetual one-way pegs in order to create a new type of sidechain. The bad news: it won't make you rich but it could help scale Bitcoin! Helpful Links: https://medium.com/@RubenSomsen/21-million-bitcoins-to-rule-all-sidechains-the-perpetual-one-way-peg-96cb2f8ac302 Support t...

In this episode Sjors and Aaron discuss Jose Femenias' Easypaysy proposal, an account system for Bitcoin, on Bitcoin. They also announce groundbreaking news: The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado now has its own RSS-feed! Aaron's article covering Easypaysy on Bitcoin Magazine https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-need-accounts-one-developer-thinks-figured The BIP in Github https://github.com/bitcoin/bip...

Sjors and Aaron discuss Signet, a new type of testnet for Bitcoin that was merged into Bitcoin Core last week. They also discuss the original version of testnet and its problems, as well as alternative testing environment regtest. Support the Show! Follow Bitcoin Magazine on Twitter @BitcoinMagazine Follow Aaron van Wirdum @AaronvanW Follow Sjors Provoost @provoost Music: Song Title: Segwit Sounds...

Schnorr signature support was merged into the libsec256k1 library last week. In the episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors discuss what the libsecp256k1 library is, why it matters for Bitcoin, and what it means that Schnorr signature support was merged. Sjors also briefly explains what he ultimate send RPC is, his own pull request that was recently merged into Bitcoin Core as well. H...

Aaron and Sjors welcome their first guest on to the show, Ruben Somsen, to discuss his proposals for Statechains on Bitcoin! Statechains allow you to send keys not UTXO and it offers quite a few scaling and functionality improvements!  Helpful Links: Ruben's presentation on Bitcoin Magazine about Statechains:  https://youtu.be/CKx6eULIC3A Aaron's Bitcoin Magazine article on Statechains: https://bi...

In this episode of the Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Sjors and Aaron explain what an xpub is and how it is used by Bitcoin wallets. Helpful Links: http://rosenbaum.se/book/grokking-bitcoin-4.html#_hierarchical_deterministic_wallets https://walletsrecovery.org Support the Show! Follow Bitcoin Magazine on Twitter @BitcoinMagazine Follow Aaron van Wirdum @AaronvanW Follow Sjors Provoost @provoost Music: Song...

In this episode of the Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Sjors and Aaron discuss the future of Bitcoin Scaling. This podcast is all about Taproot and the cool feature it enables called Payment pools.  Topics What are payment pools?   Why they need Taproot.    The UX of sharing UTXOs   How Payment pools work with lightning Helpful Links: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/building-on-taproot-payment-pools-co...

In this episode of the Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Sjors explains the "time-warp attack" on Bitcon and Aaron explains the unfolding drama with the bcash difficulty adjustment. Helpful Links: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/miners-are-milking-bcashs-difficulty-adjustments-and-why-problem1 https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/why-bcash-mining-shouldnt-affect-bitcoin-much-bitcoin-mining-could-ruin-bca...

In this episode of the Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors dive into Miniscript and how it makes using Bitcoin Script much easier.  Helpful Links:  https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/miniscript-how-blockstream-engineers-are-making-bitcoin-programming-easyer Support the Show! Follow Bitcoin Magazine on Twitter @BitcoinMagazine Follow Aaron van Wirdum @AaronvanW Follow Sjors Provoost @provoost M...

In the third episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors break down and explain the different opinions and options available for activating Taproot and potentially future softfork upgrades.    Helpful Links:   Explainer article by Aaron discussing the different upgrade options:  https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bip-8-bip-9-or-modern-soft-fork-activation-how-bitcoin-could-upgrade-next...

In the second episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors break down and explain Taproot, the building blocks that make Taproot possible, and what it enables Bitcoin to do.    Helpful Links:    Taproot Explainer:  https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/taproot-coming-what-it-and-how-it-will-benefit-bitcoin     Support the Show!    Follow Bitcoin Magazine on Twitter @BitcoinMagazine    Follo...

Bitcoin Magazine's Technical editor Aaron van Wirdum teams up with Bitcoin core contributor Sjors Provoost to explain Bitcoin one episode at a time. In the debut episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, Aaron and Sjors break down and explain Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT) and Replace By Fee (RBF) and some really tricky attacks that where recently discovered in Bitcoin.  Helpful Links:  P...