Today is fifteen years from the date of the publication of the Bitcoin whitepaper. A lot has happened in that fifteen years. Bitcoin went through the blocksize war. A nation state has adopted Bitcoin. We are possibly on the verge of a Bitcoin ETF approval. Bitcoin in almost every way …

Privacy is a complicated subject. It’s not always a simple binary thing, private or not private, seen or unseen. Seen by whom? Private from whom? Private to what degree? If you are walking down the street with a mask on your face no one can see your face, so that …

One of the fundamental limitations of the Lightning protocol is how payment routing is handled and accomplished. It is entirely source routed, meaning that the sender of a payment is the one who constructs the entire route from themselves to the receiver in order to facilitate the payment. This presents …

So a lot of noise has been made around the Lightning vulnerability recently disclosed by Antoine Riard. Many people are claiming the sky is falling, that Lightning is fundamentally broken, and nothing could be further from the truth. I think part of the problem is that people don’t really understand …

Yesterday’s FinCEN rule proposal is incredibly overbroad, comprehensive, and perfectly designed to allow arbitrary information collection at any scope they choose to enforce. It truly is a mind-blowingly large grab attempt at private information of anyone they can get their hands on. They want all regulated entities — VASPs, banks, …

One of the biggest inherent limitations to the Lightning Network is the limited number of channels that can be opened or closed per block given the blocksize limit. Regardless of how many transactions can occur off-chain how cheaply, this is a fundamental bottleneck restricting how many people could actually realistically …

This article is featured in Bitcoin Magazine’s “The Withdrawal Issue”. Click here to subscribe now. A PDF pamphlet of this article is available for download.  Self custody is an essential requirement when using Bitcoin to fully benefit from all the properties that make Bitcoin valuable in the first place. To …

Shinobi’s Strawman is a weekly series where our Technical Editor Shinobi challenges the Bitcoin community, aiming to stir up conversation around heated technical debates. ______________________________________________________________ So, some complete autist who is a relative newcomer to the public arena had to just come out of absolutely nowhere and drop a crazy …

Somewhere, out there in the depths of the universe, a miracle occurred. A single proton was unfolded into two dimensions. All eleven dimensions of its vast, and currently not understood by humankind, multi-dimensional structure was laid flat and bare like a sheet of paper. On that surface the etching began, …

​​Fear the wizards. Not those wizards, real wizards. Announced today by developer Robin Linus of ZeroSync, an association founded to help scale Bitcoin by using zero-knowledge proofs, BitVM is a proposal that opens very interesting doors for Bitcoin application development going forward. It can enable pretty much any arbitrary computation, …

Shinobi’s Strawman is a weekly series where our Technical Editor Shinobi challenges the Bitcoin community, aiming to stir up conversation around heated technical debates. _________________________________________________________________ Last week I published a short prompt looking to hear some readers thinking on different covenant proposals. The design space of covenants has rapidly evolved …

Yesterday marks coming up to the finishing line after almost four years of work. Assumeutxo was merged into the Bitcoin Core master branch by Andrew Chow yesterday. This is the first major non-consensus update to the Bitcoin reference implementation in quite a while, and is going to have a lot …