Bitcoin Technical Intelligence

Protocol Development

• Mempool relay policy vs consensus rules. Current disputes are about node policy (transaction relay/mempool) rather than consensus validity. Core maintainers argue that certain consensus‑valid but historically non‑standard transactions (e.g., very large OP_RETURN/inscriptions and sub‑1 sat/vB) are being mined via out‑of‑band paths, introducing centralization risk (reduced visibility, poorer fee estimation for nodes) if default relay does not account for this 17 The current debate is over policy rules, specifically mempool transaction relay rules. It's not actually over consensus rules. And in that situation it's very much what your node is running mostly affects yourself. The core maintainer's argument is that valid transactions that have historically been considered non standard bitcoin core and have not been relayed by bitcoin core are getting confirmed anyway and they're going directly to miners. And the result is you have potential centralization risks where, where transactions are going out of band and no one sees those transactions until after they're mined and other miners can't compete with them and node operators can't do accurate fee estimation. If we actually have a high fee environment which we obviously do not have right now. And two examples of those are the incredibly large inscriptions or three examples incredibly large opera turns, the incredibly large inscriptions and then also Most recently the sub1 SAP per byte transactions. Right? Those by default are not relayed by notes. So on a technical basis that's what the argument's over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 16 The core maintainer's argument is that valid transactions that have historically been considered non standard bitcoin core and have not been relayed by bitcoin core are getting confirmed anyway and they're going directly to miners. And the result is you have potential centralization risks where, where transactions are going out of band and no one sees those transactions until after they're mined and other miners can't compete with them and node operators can't do accurate fee estimation. If we actually have a high fee environment which we obviously do not have right now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 15 And two examples of those are the incredibly large inscriptions or three examples incredibly large opera turns, the incredibly large inscriptions and then also Most recently the sub1 SAP per byte transactions. Right? Those by default are not relayed by notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic . Alternative implementations that relax filters aim to relay a broader set of transactions at the cost of accepting some centralization and estimation trade‑offs 13 So CORA is that side, the non core pro knot side is more or less that yes, they can be mined anyway we're willing to take the centralization risk and that trade off that comes with it and the lack of accurate fee estimation estimation. If you are running a node to just make it a little bit more difficult and more expensive for these transactions to happen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic .

• OP_RETURN defaults context. Gloria Zhao reiterated that the recent OP_RETURN defaults discussion “has absolutely nothing to do with wanting arbitrary data stuffed in the chain,” pointing to the PR commentary for details 95 Some people seem to have missed the summary accompanying the OP_RETURN defaults increase, so I’ll post it here again. It has absolutely nothing to do with *wanting* arbitrary data stuffed in the chain.https://x.com/glozow/status/1963994804997537830 94 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/32406#issuecomment-2955614286https://x.com/glozow/status/1963994806083875049 .

• Arbitrary data can’t be reliably banned by policy alone. A conference talk summarized BitMEX Research’s view that encodings can embed arbitrary data (even image payloads) into standard structures like keys; preventing it would imply forbidding normal primitives, which is not feasible within Bitcoin’s current design 41 So Bitmex research Johnny, shout out to Johnny finally did a write up and tried to be as articulate and as pedagogical as is possible to show you guys that it is not possible to prevent arbitrary data from getting inserted into the blockchain. You can literally invent encoding schemes that puts the image data in private keys and makes those private keys vulnerable such that you can still embed images into the blockchain. If you want to stop image data, arbitrary data from getting into the blockchain, you're going to have to ban bitcoin addresses, you're going to have to ban bitcoin private keys and you're harassing people like Kalle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w .

• Covenants and soft‑fork pathfinding. A soft fork is a backward‑compatible rule change that lets non‑upgrading nodes stay on the same chain 39 So first, what's a soft fork? So it's essentially a way that we can change Bitcoin and it's backwards compatible. And kind of what that means is it ensures that nodes who have not upgraded their software to adopt the software can remain on the same blockchain as those that have kind of adopted the fork. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 . Script is intentionally limited (no native future‑spend constraints or in‑script proof verification within block limits), constraining on‑chain programmability 38 It's essentially a scripting language, for lack of a better term, the execution environment that, that dictates the rules that transactions have to be abide by to be considered valid transactions. And it's intentionally limited, so it's not really expressive like other scripting languages used in other blockchains. And that lack of expressiveness is a feature because it can, you know, prevent kind of things like malicious forms of MEV and things of that nature. So it's intentionally limited. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 37 So what do we mean by limit it? Right. So for example, there's no future spending constraints, so I can't restrict the way that a bitcoin will be spent in the future. We can't do native proof verification. So I can't verify something called a zero knowledge proof or a validity proof within a single bitcoin script that fits in the block size limit due to like the limitations in the scripting capabilities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 . CheckTemplateVerify (CTV) is discussed for simpler vaults and safety rails (future‑spend restrictions), and for reducing interactivity in constructions like ARC 36 These like we talked about on the CTV panel vaults. So we can build things like vaults today by doing these huge pre signed transactions like emulate them. But if we add CTV we can decrease the complexity and make it a lot more user friendly and give users the ability to just dictate the way that UTXOs can be spent in the future. Add like a safety, like a safety feature, like if, if you want to have like a fallback undo button. CTV makes this a lot easier and reduces the complexity to build these things to make it easier for users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 35 Things like L2s like arc where users have to come on periodically to join in something called a batch output transaction to maintain custody of their funds. CTV can limit some of the interactivity requirements and make it easier for users to participate in these types of transactions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 . Additional proposals such as OP_CAT and state‑carrying covenants could enable on‑chain verification of L2 state rather than relying on federations, but may introduce new risks (e.g., MEV‑like dynamics that could pressure miner centralization) 34 Roll up bridges, roll ups work today on Bitcoin they exist and we can rely on things like bitvm. They give us this like permissioned one of n assumption, but it's still a federation in the sense that not anybody can participate. And this becomes much better if we have something like opcat where we can have state carrying covenants and things like called native proof verification. So we can use an on chain smart contract to verify the state of the L2 system instead of relying on a kind of permission system that executes that off chain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 31 Yeah, there's maybe unintended consequences. So for example, if we implement something like opcat, are we able to build expressive enough scripts to introduce things that by a product of that do things like mevl, where there's. Which can increase minor centralization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 . Speakers noted social consensus is the bottleneck; delaying decisions increases ossification risk 32 Like why aren't we going to add all these fancy opcodes to verify snarks and do better bitcoin staking and improve a lot of the assumptions with self custody? Social consensus is just really, really, really hard. People want different things. Roll ups want snark verification. People building potentially on ARC want different types of opcodes. So these conflicting wants between different application teams means that everyone in the space has different priorities. And now we're getting into a situation where nation states and institutions and everybody are coming into the space. So we kind of have this last point where this might be the last time that we can actually kind of coordinate a upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol. And failure to move on that right now means that we're closer to ossification. And I would recommend that we don't do that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 27 But what I will say is that if you're interested in using Bitcoin as peer to peer cash in online Internet markets and kind of in person retail transactions, a soft fork is going to make that a lot easier and incentivize better applications and better and more developers to come build on Bitcoin. So it just depends on what you want. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 .

• Inscriptions/fee market observations. On‑chain JPEG inscriptions rose from ~88M (May) to ~105M four months later (~20% increase), primarily using Taproot inscriptions 107 in may there were 88mil JPEGs in the chain, now 4 months later, there are 105mil JPEGS, a 20% increase. in may 7000btc fees had been paid, at $100k btc that’s $700m or an average of $8 per JPEG. they are primarily in taproot inscriptions. (@BitMEXResearch data)https://x.com/adam3us/status/1963835584377442653 . One estimate attributed ~1% excess fees vs. normal transactions and roughly ~1.5% of combined fee+reward (estimated from reward only) to this activity; persistently higher fees encourage miner investment in hashpower 103 @ BitMEXResearch that’s about 1.5% of the fee market. note fees are not simple: blocks are not always full, the spam displaced other transaction fees, lets pick a crude estimate 1% of excess fees from spam vs transactions. if fees are persistently higher miners invest in buying more ASICs, andhttps://x.com/adam3us/status/1963840781682184361 84 @ BitMEXResearch 1.5% of the fees AND reward. the bulk of which is reward still. i actually estimated from reward only.https://x.com/adam3us/status/1963867320188645610 .

• Governance primacy of validating nodes. Several reminders from prior conflicts: economic nodes enforce consensus; miners can’t unilaterally change protocol; market forces decided the block‑size dispute 106 @ BitMEXResearch protocol rules are enforced by economic nodes, miners are just service providers; miners cannot change protocol rules. (everyone learned that counter-intuitive fact during the block-size wars). proof of work, hashrate and bitcoin price come from the real world. there are signalshttps://x.com/adam3us/status/1963836435426885805 104 @ BitMEXResearch the block-size war was won by the market, users set the price in the market. (the protocol can measure consensus valid hashrate which reacts to price. users said NO via the economic force of the market. miners followed, as they are just service providers)https://x.com/adam3us/status/1963837986165895444 .

Lightning & Layer‑2 Progress

• LN router economics: automation is trending but naive “safe, high‑fee” strategies cut volume and lower total revenue. More sophisticated fee automation is needed for better router yield 102 There has been a trend towards automation of LN fee rates to simplify management overhead for router nodes. The early algorithms have focused on safer, higher fees, at the cost of total volume. But this actually results in lower revenue, so we need more sophisticated automation.https://x.com/alexbosworth/status/1963963866632913266 . Technical significance: smarter dynamic pricing could improve network liquidity and forwarding reliability.

• User‑level Lightning. Fees are typically very small and settlement is near‑instant, but users must pre‑provision channels/liquidity to have a usable spending limit 49 The fees on lightning are very small, and the speed is almost instant. But requires a bit of preparation to make sure you have a usable spending limit available on lightning.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n99j18/comment/ncl3zg8/ . Multiple payment layers (e.g., Lightning) extend Bitcoin’s transactional throughput, with popular mobile implementations such as Wallet of Satoshi and Phoenix 48 Multiple payment layers allow Bitcoin to do what you think it can't. The Lightning Network allows bitcoin to be sent and spent extremely fast with very low fees. Multiple mobile phone apps like Wallet of Satoshi and Phoenix, allow this.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n99j18/comment/nckz43w/ .

• Overlay protocols and trade‑offs (ARK/“arkade_os”). Summary from discussion: arkade behaves like an overlay‑mempool system; unilateral exits exist but their cost‑effectiveness depends on vTXO size; VM state transitions rely on cooperating servers. Zero‑conf‑like swaps reduce latency but introduce reliance on the operator batching users; if servers don’t cooperate, users may face double‑spend/collusion risks akin to statechains 99 1: IIUC the arkade part is basically some overlay mempool type thing, you have exit, but whether or not it’s economical depends on the size of your vtxo. The arkade specific stuff relies on server cooperation for vm related state transitionshttps://x.com/roasbeef/status/1964068796626587732 100 @ theinstagibbs 2: swaps w/o waiting for a conf is basically zero conf, slightly diff tho as you rely on the server to let you into the next batch so you can gain a newly rooted vtxohttps://x.com/roasbeef/status/1964069349821382903 98 in theory if they don’t, you’re vulnerable, as the normal double spend collusion caveat applies w/ statechainshttps://x.com/roasbeef/status/1964069349821382903 101 would still like to know how their arkade_os maps to unilateral exit. I suspect it basically doesn’t because it can’thttps://x.com/theinstagibbs/status/1960427536455712796 . Impact: faster UX at the expense of stronger trust/minimization.

• L2 status and requirements. One talk asserted only two Bitcoin L2s are in production today: Lightning and Spark 28 So if you kind of remember last year there was like tons of interest in like Bitcoin L2s and doing all this stuff, you can actually there's only two protocols in production that you can consider them to be L2s. One is called Spark, the other is called the Lightning network. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 . Trust‑minimized L2s need data posted to Bitcoin (data availability), preserving miner fees while allowing off‑chain sequencing/business models 29 And then there's another thing where you have trust minimized L2s. So you have this kind of other flywheel. You know, degeneracy on chain. Degeneracy is not really like Bitcoin has really slow block time. So maybe trading like meme coins on bitcoin isn't great and people get annoyed by that and they call it spam. So let's take that off chain and give people like a similar L1 custody assumption. In an L2 environment, the app devs can make money because they're running sequencers and can accrue value and then the fees will still go to miners. Because to build a trust minimized L2 we need to post the data to Bitcoin. That's like a requirement of that. So we can still put transactions on Bitcoin that pay fees to miners and we kind of have this like the, the, the, the degens get what they want, the app devs get what they want and the miners are still getting paid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 . CTV could lower interactivity in some L2s and enable on‑chain slashing for Bitcoin staking scripts (today emulated via committees, which can collude to avoid slashing) 35 Things like L2s like arc where users have to come on periodically to join in something called a batch output transaction to maintain custody of their funds. CTV can limit some of the interactivity requirements and make it easier for users to participate in these types of transactions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 33 And then things like Bitcoin staking which are now being used today to help secure some L2 networks. They work today. You can enter into bitcoin staking scripts but because you're working with a, a pre. A CTV emulation committee, malicious stakers can actually collude with the committee signers to avoid slashing and CTV can better and like enforce programmatic slashing into Bitcoin. Staking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 . Caution: more expressive opcodes like OP_CAT may also enable MEV‑like vectors and miner centralization pressures 31 Yeah, there's maybe unintended consequences. So for example, if we implement something like opcat, are we able to build expressive enough scripts to introduce things that by a product of that do things like mevl, where there's. Which can increase minor centralization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 .

• Ecash overlays (Nostr + Cashu). NPUB Cash turns any Nostr npub into a Lightning address; the service originally held bearer Cashew tokens server‑side (next‑in‑line custodian while the mint is ultimate custodian) 4 So NP cache. The idea basically is a lightning address for everyone based on NASA and Cashew. So if you ever like had a different lightning address, you know that it's like you need a web service of some sorts to like host it, right? Usually that is done via custodian. That's probably where most people get their lightning addresses. You can do it yourself, but you require like an LN URL server. It's. It's a bit of a headache to set up with a personal, like private node on Tor and stuff. So when I started working on Cashew, the thing that I love the most, and also Noster is the thing that I love the most about these two protocols is like everything is public infrastructure, right? You don't. You don't need to do your own stuff. You can do your own stuff, right? But like with relays out there with that don't require like you to set up something yourself. You could just communicate with them and cacher has the mins. You can just communicate with them without having to set up something yourself. You can use public infrastructure to just build things. So I was like, okay, maybe we can build a lighting address on that. And turns out we were able to do that. So that's basically unpub of cache. It's a lighting address that does not require signup that just is based on your nostril identity that uses NASA public keys and private keys for authentication. And if you have an OSTER account, you have an NPUP cache lighting address because it's your npup at npub cache is already your lighting address. So if I know your endpub, I can, I can zap you and you can redeem the set later on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA 3 So, so right, like in the, in the, in the base case, because the mint is the real custodian. I mean, it also depends on like, how do you define custodian with the base setup that is like the most compatible setup, Endpoint cache, the server is in possession of the cache approves. So it. Okay, it's holding the bearer IO. Yes, exactly. So it is not technically like the mint is still the custodian, but like Endpoint cash is the next in line custodian. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA . Security enhancements lock tokens to user pubkeys so the server cannot spend them 2 Then with, with cashier there's pay to public key, for example, where you can like lock tokens to a certain public key. So whoever holds the token will not be able to redeem it with the mint without actually signing for it as well. So with that NPOD cash can actually like not be in the like the next in line custodian anymore, basically. So if the token is locked to your public key, even NPOP cash couldn't spend it and it's actually very good for NPOP cash as well, because it's not in honeypot anymore. Right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA . The experimental NPUBX design stores mint quotes (secrets) instead of pre‑minted tokens so clients redeem directly, further reducing server custody 1 There's even more nuance because now there's NPUB X cache, which is the nightly version of npub cache v2. Basically the reason why we build it on a different or I build it on a different domain is because obviously I didn't want to break it for people that currently use it. But there's the experimental NPOPX cache that works in a completely different way. Like from the outside it still works. It looks like the exact same thing, but on the inside it is actually not even creating tokens, cash tokens. It is just like creating a Mint quote with the Mint. So basically requesting an invoice and then storing the secret that is used to redeem that invoice with the Mint. And then a cache wallet can actually go there and redeem the token themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA . Significance: federation/ecash overlays can improve UX and privacy but introduce operator/mint trust; multi‑mint and key‑lock features mitigate some risks.

• UX signals. A Spiral podcast highlighted the importance of simple addresses/UX and a community shift toward sats as the everyday unit—helpful for small payments and mental accounting 93 On 21 in 21, @ ConorOkus shares his journey from footballer to @ spiralbtc PM, what he looks for in grant applications, why UX & easy bitcoin addresses matter, the ₿ vs sats shift, and advice for new contributors. https://x.com/PresidioBitcoin/status/1963997588082053496 .

Infrastructure Updates

• Node software releases and choices.

  • Bitcoin Knots v29.1.knots20250903 released. Users are urged to verify downloads; tag: v29.1.knots20250903 97 Bitcoin Knots 29.1.knots20250903 released! 🎉https://x.com/BitcoinKnots/status/1964053737997262922 96 Be sure to verify your download(s)!https://x.com/BitcoinKnots/status/1964053737997262922 88 https://bitcoinknots.org/?29.1?twitterhttps://x.com/BitcoinKnots/status/1964053737997262922 87 @ martindale @ Dennis_Porter_ @ LarryBitcoin The tag for v29.1.knots20250903 is v29.1.knots20250903https://x.com/LukeDashjr/status/1964122544723857454 . The last 21.x Knots (v21.2.knots20210629) has known security issues; version numbering moved from “0.x” to “x” by dropping the leading zero 85 @ martindale @ Dennis_Porter_ @ LarryBitcoin Nobody supports versions that old anymore. Why are you trying to use them? The last 21.x Knots was v21.2.knots20210629 - but it has known security issues…https://x.com/LukeDashjr/status/1964123228890140820 86 @ martindale @ Dennis_Porter_ @ LarryBitcoin The leading zero was simply dropped.https://x.com/LukeDashjr/status/1964133931160104994 .
  • Wasabi Wallet v2.7: stabilization update, improved node integration, “smarter” coordinators, UI refresh, and bug fixes. Update notifications and verification are now distributed via Nostr relays to reduce reliance on centralized channels; best practice remains PGP verification 22 Software update here From Wasabi version 2.7 has been released. Stabilization update that boosts reliability while bringing a fresh look and smoother performance. Performance enhanced node integration, refreshed UI one config slash network, smarter coordinators and many bug fixes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 21 Well, one thing Wasabi has done, which is I think really clever is, and they've done this in the past is when an update happens, you get notified in the app and then it automatically does the verification for you on the next release and make sure it's signed. Because most people aren't actually checking PGP signatures. Obviously it's strictly better for you to actually check PGP signatures yourself. Usually if you use an app store, it's doing the verification for you, but obviously then you're trusting Google to do the verification or Apple to doing the verification. In this case, the way the verification is handled is the actual app you already have installed is locally doing the verification, operating under the belief that if you already have it installed, you already been using it, it's probably not a malicious app, it's probably the correct one and so it can verify the next one. Those updates were getting sent by a centralized server. I think GitHub was involved in the process and now it's all being delivered via Noster relays. So they've distributed that out. I think that's a very clever mechanism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic . Sparrow is desktop‑only; beware fake mobile apps—install from sparrowwallet.com and verify signatures 20 But oh yeah, wait, real quick. Sparrow is only available on desktop. It's not available in app stores. There's fake Sparrow wallets and app stores. Don't download those. Those are fake. The only Real Sparrow is sparrowwallet.com and best practice on first install is to do a PGP signature verification. There is a guide there on how to verify it, but then after you do it the first time, or you can just. You're probably fine if you just download and don't verify it. So don't let that hold you back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic . Node platforms like Start9 make it easy to select Core vs Knots and adjust configs; operators can also run Core in blocks‑only mode (no mempool) for reliability preferences 18 But I would like to see more options available. And I will say that Start nine makes it really easy to to choose if you want to run knots or core, or if you want to run core blocks only mode. And they make it really easy to update your config file. And from a 1031 perspective, we're proudly the largest investor in Start9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 19 So if you are using these things in production and you, you know, you really need like reliable uptime or whatnot, you do have the option of running Bitcoin core in blocks only mode and just doing no Mempool whatsoever. And then you're not relaying any transactions, you're just simply downloading mined blocks, which is not necessarily a bad option, depending on how you fall on this stuff. But yeah, users have many options. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic .

• Client incident: Blockstream app/Jade reports. Multiple users reported wallet login/loading failures across platforms, sometimes with on‑chain accounts visible while Lightning accounts failed to load; app warnings cited “network issues,” and one user could not restore to a fresh device during the incident. Logs showed repeated empty UTXO results; users noted lack of timely public status updates 71 Is yours also stuck on this same Loading Wallet screen?https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9h95e/comment/ncmsdfy/ 70 yes i've used it, seems like an outage right now on their endhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9h95e/comment/ncmtbiv/ 56 Edit: Maybe it's specific to lightning network and their Greenlight system. It's loading on-chain now but not my lightning wallet.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9h95e/comment/ncn44ae/ 55 It's intermittent now. I can see my on-chain and my Lightning wallet sometimes and there is a message in the app "Warning! Some accounts cannot be logged into due to network issues. Please update the Blockstream App and try again later." Been like this for a couple of hours now. Verified my Electrs instance is up and fully functional and my Bitcoin Core node is fully sync'd and operational. Weird there isn't more information about the problem.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9h95e/comment/nco0is0/ 54 Removed my personal Electrum server configuration from the mobile app and it still bombs out on "Logging in..." so it isn't a local issue.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9h95e/comment/nco0is0/ 53 Same for me, I can add that all devices are stuck (Mac, Windows, ios, android) ... looks like an issue with Blockstream side their back-end. Looking at the app logs on the Mac, seeing this repeating.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9h95e/comment/ncne2nu/ 52 14.122 INFO - GDKRUST_call_session get_unspent_outputs output "Ok(Object {})"https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9h95e/comment/ncne2nu/ 51 Filed a support ticket using the online support link. Can't restore wallet either to a fresh device using seed phrase or access hot or Jade wallets.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9h95e/comment/ncne2nu/ 50 Zero updates on X from blockstream ... Really disappointing.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9h95e/comment/ncne2nu/ . Technical takeaway: avoid single‑vendor dependencies for critical access; ensure alternate wallet paths and backups work under service degradation.

• Mining and physical infra. A “Hash Hut: Texas Edition” test video circulated; one observer praised operators for actively fixing “filters” while others “LARP” 92 Hash Hut: Texas Edition shop testing underway #Bitcoinhttps://x.com/SGBarbour/status/1963657883847168113 91 https://x.com/SGBarbour/status/1963657883847168113 90 While some miners are just whining and LARPing, this miner is actually putting in the work to fix the filters. 👏👏👏 https://x.com/SGBarbour/status/1963657883847168113https://x.com/lopp/status/1964034316159033805 . Impact: ongoing industrialization and operational improvements at mining sites.

• Network health snapshot. At block height 913,191 with ~57 blocks to the next retarget, an estimated +5.4% difficulty adjustment was cited; average block interval ~9m29s during the sample. One mempool instance showed ~5,975 transactions and ignored sub‑1 sat/vB transactions in that view 26 Oh, I was, I was loving that we were recording today we're a block height 913, 191. Which means we are only 57 blocks away from the next difficulty retarget. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 25 Sats per dollar time between time till the next difficulty adjustment and the estimated difficulty adjustment and the estimated difficulty adjustment for later tonight is 5.4 upwards adjustment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 24 Blocksman coming in at 9 minutes and 29 seconds on average. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 23 Clark's teeny weeny mempool which isn't recognizing sub one sat per V byte transactions has 5,975 transactions in it. Man pulled out space 94, 501. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic . Empty blocks were also noted as periodically occurring 79 Yes. Empty blocks actually occur now from time to time.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9ipuu/comment/ncn2n40/ . Anecdotally, a user reported a 24‑minute confirmation for ~$0.25 in fees, consistent with currently light mempools in some periods 57 I'm transfering cash from brokers and EFT took 24h at best for 5$. Bitcoin took 24 minutes at worst for 0.25$.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n99j18/comment/ncl4rbb/ .

• Peer behavior anomaly. An investigation described peers with version timestamps behind by up to ~5,100 minutes (noted on Core v27.1/v27.2), triggering Libbitcoin to drop them. A maintainer acknowledged and said they would fix; full write‑up linked 47 In late June 2025, Eric Voskuil reached out to me asking about a weird behaviour he had observerved on the Bitcoin network. Libbitcoin had started dropping peers which advertized an excessively off timestamp in their version message and they found that while most peers were within seconds, a handful were off by small amounts and a large number was behind by up to 5100 minutes. What’s more, all those peers were Bitcoin Core v27.1 or v27.2. [...]https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9ebwz/comment/nclwxmq/ 45 ty for the heads up, will fixhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9ebwz/comment/nclzko7/ 46 https://antoinep.com/posts/misbehaving_nodes/https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9ebwz/ .

• Weekly engineering round‑up. Optech Newsletter #370 summarizes consensus‑change discussions, new releases/RCs, and notable infrastructure software changes 69 Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #370https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n92mkw/ 68 This week’s newsletter includes our regular sections summarizing discussion about changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules, announcing new release and release candidates, and describing notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n92mkw/comment/ncjdmff/ 67 https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2025/09/05/https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n92mkw/ .

Developer Discussions

• Relay policy trade‑offs quantified. A summary framed the impasse: pro‑filter view claims significant spam reduction with minimal miner centralization; anti‑filter view claims negligible spam reduction with substantial centralization from filtering. Better measurement is needed on both effects 12 And so look and pull up this tweet Neil said, What was this? September 2nd? So two days ago, the intractability of Bitcoin's filter debate boils down to this. Pro filter spam reduction is significant. Minor centralization effects are minimal. Filters are worth the trade off. The anti filter spam reduction is negligible. Minor centralization effects are substantial. Removing filters worth the trade off. No one likes spam or minor centralization. But both sides will continue to talk past each other until more effort is made to quantify the filter's effect on spam and the filter's effect on minor centralization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic .

• Implementation diversity and operator choice. By design, Core developers cannot force upgrades (no auto‑updates), reinforcing that policy defaults affect primarily the node that opts into them 10 By default. Core devs cannot force you to do anything. There's no auto updates and. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 17 The current debate is over policy rules, specifically mempool transaction relay rules. It's not actually over consensus rules. And in that situation it's very much what your node is running mostly affects yourself. The core maintainer's argument is that valid transactions that have historically been considered non standard bitcoin core and have not been relayed by bitcoin core are getting confirmed anyway and they're going directly to miners. And the result is you have potential centralization risks where, where transactions are going out of band and no one sees those transactions until after they're mined and other miners can't compete with them and node operators can't do accurate fee estimation. If we actually have a high fee environment which we obviously do not have right now. And two examples of those are the incredibly large inscriptions or three examples incredibly large opera turns, the incredibly large inscriptions and then also Most recently the sub1 SAP per byte transactions. Right? Those by default are not relayed by notes. So on a technical basis that's what the argument's over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic . Knots is a Core‑derived client that filters non‑monetary transactions by design, changing relay behavior; supporters cite added decentralization choices while critics point to potential harm (e.g., the OP_RETURN episode) 14 Well, a lot of people in the space don't like what they term spam being on the bitcoin blockchain. So spam in their, the way that they define it is the jpegs, the ordinals, the inscriptions, all this kind of stuff that end up in bitcoin blocks. By definition, it is not spam. So the. If you're paying a fee for something, it's not spam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 59 Knots does not do anything useful and does a bit of harm, at least with the whole OP_RETURN debacle. At all. Many people explained this (including me, for example here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n198pa/daily_discussion_august_27_2025/nb3pcca/ )https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n8z9h0/comment/ncj0ifp/ .

“Core devs cannot force you to do anything. There’s no auto updates.” 10 By default. Core devs cannot force you to do anything. There's no auto updates and. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic

• Maintainer credentials. One talk referenced contribution stats to contextualize maintainer trust: Gloria Zhao listed as the 12th most active Core contributor; Luke Dashjr the 15th 40 Look at her commit history. Gloria is the 12th most active contributor to the bitcoin core repo. This is Luke, the 15th most. And people are asking why she qualified to be a maintainer of the bitcoin code base. Because she's active. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w .

• OP_RETURN defaults clarification. As noted above, the reposted summary stressed the change was not about inviting arbitrary data 95 Some people seem to have missed the summary accompanying the OP_RETURN defaults increase, so I’ll post it here again. It has absolutely nothing to do with *wanting* arbitrary data stuffed in the chain.https://x.com/glozow/status/1963994804997537830 94 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/32406#issuecomment-2955614286https://x.com/glozow/status/1963994806083875049 .

• Arbitrary data and pragmatism. Another discussion argued that reversing inscriptions/large payloads would require disruptive consensus changes (e.g., removing OP_RETURN or reducing block size), so operational pragmatism and clear local policy choices are emphasized 8 Some people get mad at me. But like I, I said this earlier this year too. I don't think there's anything we can do to reverse this outside of making blocks smaller or completely doing a consensus change that takes out opreturn or something like that. So you just have to live with what's valid via consensus. Right now I don't like the shit either, but that's the perspective I take. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic .

Adoption Fundamentals

• Money properties and supply. Bitcoin implements a digital bearer asset enabling true peer‑to‑peer digital transfers without third‑party coordination; the protocol’s core properties include permissionlessness, censorship resistance, unconfiscatability, and absolute scarcity—anchored in the 21 million cap 83 It is the creation of a digital bearer asset. Now, what does that mean? So we talk about peer to peer transfers. A peer to peer transaction is where I give you something, you take it and you walk away. We don't need a third party to monitor that. I don't give that same thing to somebody else. So if I took a gold bar and I handed it to you, Danny, you took it from me, you turned around and you walked away. You have absolute assurance that that gold bar which you're holding in your hand is with you. And there is no way that I can give that same gold bar to somebody else. Why is that? Because the laws of physics prevent that gold bar from existing in more than one place at the same time. Unless you're some kind of magician or I'm some kind of magician, let's put that aside. But, you know, it's the laws of physics that prevent that from happening, right? That's the physical world. And that's why we can have peer. We can. Throughout history, peer to peer transactions were possible. Now, if I sent you a photograph over email or WhatsApp, right, I could turn around and send that same photo to a thousand other people and they would have identical copies of that. Why? Because the photo is just informational. It is just zeros and ones. And information by nature is infinitely replicable at virtually no cost. And so the only way to ensure that I don't send that same photo that I sent you to a thousand other people is by having a trusted third party monitoring my WhatsApp or my email and confirming to you that, yes, Vijay has not sent that to anybody else. Right. And that's how it has been for decades, like whatever, since we had online digital information and so on. What Satoshi solved was that he enabled you and I to transact digitally, with you in Australia and me in London, as if we were physically present. It's as if I gave you a gold bar and you took it and you took it from me and you turned around, walked away. You can do the same thing digitally right now. That is a paradigm shifting invention. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLfNeRyhYjA 82 You know, there's so many attributes of, you know, there's permissionlessness, censorship, resistance, unconfiscatability and absolute scarcity, right? These are, these are the four core properties of Bitcoin, right? And they're all very, very valuable. But I think I'm one of those people that would say that the one property that is a little bit, everyone's created equal, but some are more equal than others. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLfNeRyhYjA 81 The key piece that needs to be inconcorruptible is the 21 million. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLfNeRyhYjA . Issuance mechanically halves: at 3.125 BTC/block today, ~3.125% of total supply will be mined this epoch; next epoch’s 1.526 BTC/block implies ~1.526% over that four‑year period 74 The amount of bitcoin distributed with each block reward approx every ten minutes is equivalent to the percentage of the total 21 million bitcoin that will be distributed during that 4 year epoch. Ex. The current block reward is 3.125 BTC, meaning that from the last halving to the next one 3.125% of all BTC will be mined. After the next halving in 2028 the block reward will fall to 1.526 BTC and during the following 4 year period 1.526% of all BTC will be mined.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9kai4/comment/ncnncnh/ . Many advocates prefer sats as the practical unit (100,000,000 sats per BTC) to normalize everyday amounts 58 What if Satoshi Nakamoto’s real plan was to trick 1.2 billion people into chasing Bitcoin, while the true currency was satoshis all along? Everyone knows 1 Bitcoin equals 100,000,000 satoshis. Satoshis are the smallest unit of BTC, making it divisible and usable for everyday transactions. But here’s a thought I’ve never seen discussed: What if satoshis are not just units of Bitcoin… but the real Bitcoin? Think about it: • Bitcoin’s cap is 21 million coins. But in satoshis, that’s 2.1 quadrillion units. • If Bitcoin adoption grows to billions of people, most will never own a full BTC. They’ll hold satoshis. • Over time, the “coin” may just become a reference point, while the satoshi becomes the true currency of the network. 🧐 Imagine a future where saying “I own 0.01 BTC” sounds outdated, and instead we talk in sats: “I own 1 million sats.” 👉 Could it be that Satoshi Nakamoto designed Bitcoin so that his namesake — the satoshi — would be the actual money of the future? Arenar Study Foundation. Educating Minds, Empowering Decentralization.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n94byh/ 93 On 21 in 21, @ ConorOkus shares his journey from footballer to @ spiralbtc PM, what he looks for in grant applications, why UX & easy bitcoin addresses matter, the ₿ vs sats shift, and advice for new contributors. https://x.com/PresidioBitcoin/status/1963997588082053496 .

• Non‑price health indicators. Some community members recommend watching hash rate and broadening time horizons rather than focusing on short‑term fiat price volatility 89 yes. Your measuring stick is using the wrong denominator. Fiat is mushy and unstable. Look at other metrics like hash rate or purchasing power. Expand the timeline. Day to day price volatility is probably the least interesting aspect of Bitcoin. The price ratio to fiat is noise. When the price was floating from $12k to $11k does that matter now? At all? When it hits $1m will $120k or $110k matter? At all?https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9nzqh/comment/nco2r48/ .

• Lightning and grassroots usage. Examples include in‑person Lightning acceptance (e.g., a Tokyo food truck) and social tipping via Nostr “zaps” for content creators, indicating repeated small‑value flows over L2 7 But I actually find this really interesting because I also visited the Tokyo bitcoin base, which is where they actually teach like grassroots bitcoin adoption. You know what bitcoin is, how to custody it, how to use it. The guy outside of the Tokyo bitcoin base, there's a food truck that accepts lightning. So it's much more like, it's a bit of a different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 6 So those who aren't on Noster, it allows you to zap people which is to send them sats over lightning for their content. I don't think many people on Noster all, I don't know, 40 to 50,000 active weekly users are are proactively reporting their, their Noster zaps partially because it's just the funds aren't that high. But eventually I do believe we live in a world where people zapping each other. Bitcoin is just a far more common occurrence. So I think this lays the groundwork for something cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 5 On Nostr, you've provided me this post. It was valuable to me. I'm going to pay you some bitcoin for it. But I think it was one of my most popular Nostr posts ever. It's got, you know, I made myself 13 bucks in Bitcoin from Zaps on that post. So, yeah, got a home of Zaps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk . Note: practical access for many still funnels through KYC exchange choke points, and developers in privacy contexts have faced legal risk 80 And when you look at what's happening at the moment, with privacy developers going to jail, we have basically the only way of realistically buying bitcoin for the vast majority of people is through these sort of KYC exchange choke points. There's also like government started to stack Bitcoin or stolen Bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLfNeRyhYjA .

• Institutional infrastructure and “economic nodes.” Large custodial actors (e.g., major ETF issuers/custodians) can sway upgrade debates due to business incentives that may not align with self‑custody UX; this adds a social‑consensus layer to technical decisions 30 So in practice they hold some type of influence in the network and they're called economic nodes. And what they're doing is they can, they can kind of sway these discussions. And because their business model relies on them providing these custodial services, they have an incentive to potentially kind of block proposals that make Bitcoin easier to use in a self custodial form. So the top holders of Bitcoin, if you look at this at Strategy ibit, which is an ETF issuer, Fidelity Grayscale tether, Bitco wptc which is a custodial wrapped Bitcoin and, and more centralized institutions. So now we're getting a lot harder. So now we have this social consensus problem. Now we're involving governments and large institutions and custodial wrappers like I mentioned, that have a business incentive to potentially not allow people to use Bitcoin in a self custodial way. That is Coinbase CBBTC is really good for Coinbase's business model and having like a trustless roll up on bitcoin would be bad for them because users might prefer that over the custodial option. And then they'll use adopt, lose adoption and lose fees, et cetera. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 .

• Non‑custodial commerce rails. Payment‑forwarding services that generate invoices and monitor the chain without taking custody (e.g., Blockonomics) reduce third‑party control; funds settle directly to user self‑custody 64 That's a fair question, and it highlights a key difference.forwarder or a software tool, not a financial middleman. They generate the invoice and watch the blockchain for the payment, but they never take custody of the funds.wallet to my self-custody wallet. Blockonomics can't freeze, hold, or reverse the transaction. That's the "middleman" I wanted to cut out – the one with control over the money.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n98c7y/comment/ncl6asj/ .

• Custody hygiene and UTXO management. Community guidance remains: not your keys, not your coins; several users cite avoiding losses during exchange failures by withdrawing to self‑custody 44 Not your keys, not your crypto.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9fl83/comment/ncmp5bs/ 43 I had used and had crypto on both Mt Gox and FTX but withdrew to my own wallets when I wasn't actively transacting there, so I was totally in the clear when both of those went under.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9fl83/comment/ncnbygu/ . Others report losses at failed exchanges, reinforcing the risk 42 Lost my BTC and other coins on cryptopia And Livecoin :/. Around 2019https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9fl83/comment/ncn7zzx/ . When off‑ramps impose low per‑withdrawal caps, users can accumulate many small UTXOs, increasing future consolidation fees; planning periodic consolidation helps 62 I'm curious about the problem in the original text by OP. Wealthsimple, bad place to buy bitcoin by the way, won't let me transfer more than $1,000 Canadian wroth at a time to my Hardwallet. Is that going to be a problem later, as described? It was equal to 0.006517 BTC today.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n950ub/comment/nckx0te/ 61 its not ideal, it will create multiple UTXOs, which depending on how many you have, will cost more in fees when you want to remove your BTC from hard storage and exchange ithttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n950ub/comment/ncl80xp/ . Moving coins from exchange to hardware wallets transitions from an IOU to on‑chain ownership with keys held locally (bitcoin “lives” on the chain; wallets secure the keys) 73 When you bought on River was actually a transaction that only happened on River, not on the actual blockchain. Sending it to your ledger is actually a transaction on the bitcoin blockchain. Your bitcoin is living on the bitcoin blockchain, it is actually not 'in your wallet'. Your Ledger wallet is just there to protect the private key that accesses your bitcoin.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n98eyw/comment/ncknhyi/ 72 You are buying it through them and they take a spread for being the intermediary. When you hold on their site yes it is an iou, until it is in your own address and you have the keys it’s technically not yours.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n98eyw/comment/ncl1nzy/ .

• Operational literacy for on‑chain verification. Verify transfers via txid and block explorers (e.g., mempool.space). Be wary when counterparties refuse to provide complete recipient addresses/txids; Bitcoin transfers are irreversible 78 You're being scammed. Ask for a transaction ID to confirm the transaction on the blockchain yourself. Drop the ID into the https://mempool.space/ and see for yourself. I'm convinced the transaction ID won't be correct.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9deur/comment/ncm28bw/ 77 https://mempool.space/https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9deur/comment/ncm28bw/ 76 Why is the "to" address cut off? What address did you actually send?https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9deur/comment/nclzhxs/ 75 You could try asking "Nora" for a transaction ID, but it all smells a bit fishy so my guess is she'll just ghost you.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9deur/comment/nclzhxs/ 63 But hey, I don't understand. Did you just sent it to a random deposit address? If it was a decent amount, than you really need to up your game. You know that one of the features of BTC is that transactions are irreversible?https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n917hv/comment/ncj5fi9/ .

Cultural Evolution

• Ossification vs iteration. Multiple voices warn that allowing an “ossification camp” to dominate could stall upgrades that improve self‑custodial UX and scaling, while others fear centralization or unintended consequences from new opcodes 32 Like why aren't we going to add all these fancy opcodes to verify snarks and do better bitcoin staking and improve a lot of the assumptions with self custody? Social consensus is just really, really, really hard. People want different things. Roll ups want snark verification. People building potentially on ARC want different types of opcodes. So these conflicting wants between different application teams means that everyone in the space has different priorities. And now we're getting into a situation where nation states and institutions and everybody are coming into the space. So we kind of have this last point where this might be the last time that we can actually kind of coordinate a upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol. And failure to move on that right now means that we're closer to ossification. And I would recommend that we don't do that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 27 But what I will say is that if you're interested in using Bitcoin as peer to peer cash in online Internet markets and kind of in person retail transactions, a soft fork is going to make that a lot easier and incentivize better applications and better and more developers to come build on Bitcoin. So it just depends on what you want. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 31 Yeah, there's maybe unintended consequences. So for example, if we implement something like opcat, are we able to build expressive enough scripts to introduce things that by a product of that do things like mevl, where there's. Which can increase minor centralization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 .

• Roles and authority. Reaffirmations that validating nodes, not miners, set the rules; developers are stewards who need user consensus for material changes 106 @ BitMEXResearch protocol rules are enforced by economic nodes, miners are just service providers; miners cannot change protocol rules. (everyone learned that counter-intuitive fact during the block-size wars). proof of work, hashrate and bitcoin price come from the real world. there are signalshttps://x.com/adam3us/status/1963836435426885805 104 @ BitMEXResearch the block-size war was won by the market, users set the price in the market. (the protocol can measure consensus valid hashrate which reacts to price. users said NO via the economic force of the market. miners followed, as they are just service providers)https://x.com/adam3us/status/1963837986165895444 105 Bitcoin is owned by humanity, the protocol developers are stewards, and need consensus from users to change it materially. bitcoin is about money, spam has no place in the timechain. what defaults the bitcoin core project puts in the reference client matter in this.https://x.com/adam3us/status/1963830548012372324 .

• What counts as “spam.” Some argue paid transactions are, by definition, not spam; others still prefer filtering non‑monetary data. The debate currently rides on measurements and policy defaults, not changes to consensus 11 If you're paying a fee for something, it's not spam. That's literally what prevents spam is the fact that it costs money. But that's how they term it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 17 The current debate is over policy rules, specifically mempool transaction relay rules. It's not actually over consensus rules. And in that situation it's very much what your node is running mostly affects yourself. The core maintainer's argument is that valid transactions that have historically been considered non standard bitcoin core and have not been relayed by bitcoin core are getting confirmed anyway and they're going directly to miners. And the result is you have potential centralization risks where, where transactions are going out of band and no one sees those transactions until after they're mined and other miners can't compete with them and node operators can't do accurate fee estimation. If we actually have a high fee environment which we obviously do not have right now. And two examples of those are the incredibly large inscriptions or three examples incredibly large opera turns, the incredibly large inscriptions and then also Most recently the sub1 SAP per byte transactions. Right? Those by default are not relayed by notes. So on a technical basis that's what the argument's over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic .

• Language and identity. Community reminders note Satoshi used terms like “time‑stamping server” and “Timechain,” not “blockchain,” reflecting Bitcoin’s roots in timestamped proof‑of‑work ledgers 66 yes i think the white paper mentions time stamping serverhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9kai4/comment/ncnmmr4/ 65 Timechain. Never did he use the word blockchain in any forum conversations or email correspondence either.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n9kai4/comment/ncnqgd5/ .

• Self‑custody as ethos. Across podcasts and community threads, the emphasis remains on open‑source, verifiable clients and hardware, independent funding for protocol work, and minimizing reliance on centralized infrastructure 9 I will say though, that I do appreciate the newfound feelings or the newfound respect for the idea of more implementations out there and just more developers working on the protocol. Like, I would like to see node operators have more choice, not less. But, and at the end of the day, I support everyone's decision to say what they want, run what they want, do what they want. That's the beauty of open source software, is that you can verify, modify, distribute and use it without permission. You even have the option to run with no mempool whatsoever. And you can run in blocks only mode and not relay any transactions if you don't want to. I will say that I do Think we are fortunate that we've gotten to this point with a pretty open relay network in Mempool. The idea that you're able to just run a node on a cheap computer and see what the transaction queue looks like is not a given in the Bitcoin consensus protocol. That is an amazing capability that we have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 60 If you are going to take this path, it's not enough to decide you will save everything in BTC. You need to learn self custody and how to keep your money safe. It's not difficult. Get an open source, bitcoin only hardware wallet. Get your btc off exchanges and into cold storage.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n99hic/comment/ncltlj1/ .

Protocol Development

• Bitcoin Core v29.1 is tagged. The maintainer notes bug fixes, improved compact block reconstruction, and lower risk of unexpected node offline events. Release notes and test binaries are available; builds can be bootstrapped via Guix instructions 91 v29.1 is now tagged: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases/tag/v29.1 . You can build it yourself, bootstrapped from a couple lines of hex: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/contrib/guix/README.md .https://x.com/fanquake/status/1963669344757448801 68 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases/tag/v29.1https://x.com/fanquake/status/1963669344757448801 95 After a longer than usual rc1, a second release candidate for 29.1 is available. This will likely turn into final. Along with a number of bug fixes, 29.1 will improve compact block reconstruction times. It will also reduce the likelihood that your node unexpectedly goes offline.https://x.com/fanquake/status/1963231324770041945 97 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/v29.1rc2/doc/release-notes.mdhttps://x.com/bitcoincoreorg/status/1961424587679232299 96 https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-29.1/test.rc2/https://x.com/bitcoincoreorg/status/1961424587679232299 67 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/contrib/guix/README.mdhttps://x.com/fanquake/status/1963669344757448801 .
• BIP 153 (“Sharing Block Templates with Peers” / sendtemplate) was assigned to ajtowns, with the draft PR tracked on the BIPs repo 93 “Sharing Block Templates with Peers” aka `sendtemplate` by @ ajtowns has been assigned BIP 153.https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963708947610886525 92 https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1937https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963708947610886525 . Technical significance: standardizing block-template exchange at the P2P layer can clarify interfaces between mining participants and peers, potentially improving interoperability of block construction workflows.
• OP_RETURN policy shift: Core contributors decided to remove the 80‑byte OP_RETURN relay policy limit after discussions that it drove more harmful workarounds (data stored in unspendable outputs) without achieving intended constraints 89 Because the policy limit on OP_RETURN outputs was not achieving anything but incentivizing harmful behaviour, Bitcoin Core contributors decided collectively after long discussions to get rid of it.https://x.com/darosior/status/1963628927156388070 90 Because they wouldn’t give up this property, important to the security of their protocol, they routed around the OP_RETURN policy limit by storing the data in unspendable outputs instead. This method is strictly more harmful to everybody, and it was incentivized by the misguided policy limits on OP_RETURN outputs (which don’t achieve anything anymore since inscriptions and since people have started being serious about bypassing mempool policy).https://x.com/darosior/status/1963628927156388070 . Rationale from proponents: some time‑sensitive off‑chain protocols need small proofs of publication in the non‑witness portion and timely propagation over the P2P relay network; the 80‑byte cap was a binding constraint for them 74 The point of making it bigger was that some applications want to have a proof of publication for a modicum amount of data (like Lightning does) in case a specific transaction in an offchain protocol is broadcast. This data needs to be in the non-witness part of the transaction, so they can’t use the (cheaper and already-available) inscription mechanism. They also cannot use OP_RETURN outputs because of the misguided 80-byte policy limit on those. If they only wanted to store data onchain, they wouldn’t be too concerned about policy limits. They could just have leveraged private APIs to miners (as they unfortunately already do for other transactions in their protocol), or even just used Libre Relay. But what they are really interested in isn’t to store this small amount of data, is to do so *while using the p2p transaction relay network*. This is why the policy limits were a binding constraint for them, and are not one for people who just want to store arbitrary data onchain regardless of how it gets there. The reason why they want to use the p2p transaction relay network is because their transactions are time-dependant (again, like in Lightning) and the p2p transaction relay network is the best mechanism available today to propagate your transaction to as many miners as possible in a timely manner, while making it hard for an adversary to prevent its propagation.https://x.com/darosior/status/1963628927156388070 . A developer also noted that large data storage already had a cheaper, established path (so expanding OP_RETURN was not about bulk data) 88 @ OrangeSurfBTC Right? It’s almost as if people who wanted to store large amounts of data already had a 4x cheaper way to do so, and all the infrastructure to make use of that.https://x.com/darosior/status/1963355701633282221 . A usage snapshot suggested only 0.007% of August OP_RETURN outputs exceeded 80 bytes 94 Just 0.007% of OP_RETURN outputs created this August were > 80 bytes. How intriguing. https://x.com/OrangeSurfBTC/status/1963339140550070727 . According to one video summary, Core plans to remove the 80‑byte limit in the v30 release (targeted for October) 66 The controversy centers on Core's planned removal of the 80 byte limit for what's known as the OP return data in its upcoming version 30 release, which is coming out in October. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ . Counterarguments warn of non‑financial spam risks and tension with Bitcoin’s monetary focus; proponents note pruned nodes can discard OP_RETURN data post‑validation 65 The technical shift aims to allow greater flexibility for embedding data on the bitcoin blockchain, but has sparked fierce opposition from the Knots camp core developers, arguing that lifting the limit will foster broader innovation, enabling use like digital art and document verification. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ 64 Warns that the proposal could turn bitcoin into a dumping ground for non financial transactions spam and undermine its monetary focus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ 63 There is also an argument in and around where it's stored. It can be jettisoned by pruned nodes. So there's a technical argument for not having to host it after the fact. Not supporters like Samson Mao. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ .
• Data-at-rest clarification: concerns that embedded blockchain data ends up verbatim on disks are unfounded; Core obfuscates on‑disk data (PR 6650) to avoid malware signature false positives, and one reply pointed out disk firmware-level behavior, too 80 People seem concerned with data embedded in the blockchain ending up verbatim on their disk: that’s not actually happening.https://x.com/EricSirion/status/1963186893119684721 85 Blockchain data is obfuscated so that you can’t troll people by embedding virus signatures and having malware scanners go wild. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6650https://x.com/EricSirion/status/1963186893119684721 79 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6650https://x.com/EricSirion/status/1963186893119684721 78 @ EricSirion This is entirely meaningless. Your disk’s firmware does it built-in toohttps://x.com/LukeDashjr/status/1963646754995237135 . Technical significance: reduces operational risk from anti‑virus scanners while preserving validation semantics.

Lightning & Layer‑2 Progress

• BTCPay Server “samrock protocol” plugin links BTCPay to Aqua to accept on‑chain (including Liquid) and Lightning without manual channel management; it generates a QR setup link to pair the wallet. It’s not live yet, but reported as heavily tested 59 It's called the samrock protocol. Also I'm realizing why it's named this and I'll. It's great. But nonetheless, what is this? Those familiar with a BTC pay server, a self sovereign way of hosting your own payment server, allowing you to set up stores and invoices and tip pages and fundraisers and all that, with Bitcoin generating new addresses every time, enabling Lightning payments, all of that stuff and a whole bunch of different tools in and around Bitcoin as a merchant. It's open source and it's an awesome piece of software. Now they have a new protocol, basically an addition you can add to your BTCPAY server called samrock protocol. And what it does is it helps remove the barriers to entry when it comes to running the Lightning node portion of your BTCPAY server. Anybody that's ever tried to run a Lightning node, you gotta set up Lightning channels and figure out liquidity and stuff like that. It can be a little tricky. All right, it's gotten easier for sure. And we're going to touch on something that has made it easier. But this is meant to be like a plug and play. Set it up and you no longer have to worry about it. And so what is this? It allows you, it's a plugin for BTC pay server. It allows you to accept Bitcoin on chain via Liquid and via Lightning Liquid being a layer two kind of pegged sidechain of Bitcoin. Nonetheless, you're getting, you know, you're basically getting your, your Bitcoin payments in Three different ways. So all is, you install the plugin on BTC Pay Server, you click on samrock protocol and add it. After clicking the button you say how you want to accept payment. You can do all three or select certain ones. And then it's going to generate a QR code containing a setup link and you just open the Aqua Wallet app and you scan it and it just links it all up and then all of those payments will go through your Aqua Wallet, which is like, you don't have to set up lightning Lightning channels or anything, it's just, it just links. Now this is not live yet with the Aqua app and everything, but it, it has been heavily tested and it should be dropping pretty soon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ 58 Now this is not live yet with the Aqua app and everything, but it, it has been heavily tested and it should be dropping pretty soon. I'm gonna for sure be playing with it again as a merchant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ . Significance: lowers merchant onboarding friction by abstracting L2 liquidity operations behind a wallet pairing flow.
• Albi Hub introduced auto‑swaps: when a Lightning channel saturates, funds can be swapped out to on‑chain destinations without closing channels; users can also set auto‑policies (maintain X in-channel) and perform swap in/out. Sub‑wallets allow segregated spending under one node (e.g., family accounts). Nostr integration and easier node linking via NWC‑style flows were highlighted 57 Now they've implemented a couple cool things, one of which is auto swaps. And so what this does anybody familiar with a lightning channel? Like if I had a lightning channel to Nathan for instance, and we had, you know, a million sats between us, basically those million sats are locked up, up and you can Picture it kind of like beads on a string between us and those beads can go back and forth. Now I'd have other strings established to other people. And so if Nathan or I wanted to pay somebody else, it's like a six degrees of Kevin Bacon. I bump beads to his side, he bumps bees to somebody else and it goes down the line until it hits its destination. Nonetheless, what can happen is if I'm a merchant and I want to be receiving payments regularly and I'm receiving a lot of payments, eventually all the beads are on my side of the string and I can't receive any more payments. And that can be a pain in the butt as a merchant. And so what they've built in is something called auto swaps. It allows you to, when your lightning channel gets full, it allows you to basically pay out of that lightning channel and trigger a swap where you're going to receive of on chain Bitcoin perhaps into like a cold card or some cold storage or something. And then that frees up you to be able to accept more payments without having to deal with any special, you know, re reallocation of funds and all of that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ 56 So the way it works. And I'll just show. So here's Albi Hub, more or less all you would do is you'd go to your wallet over on the top right there's something that says swap. It allows you to just swap in or swap out. So like if you want to take some on chain bitcoin and add it to your lightning channel, you can just do that. Or the opposite. If you want to swap out and get some bitcoin off of your lightning node and into cold storage, you can do that without closing the channel or shrinking the size of it. But you can also, up in the top right, hit auto swap and it allows you to say, okay, I want to have X amount of bitcoin in the channel at all times. But if it gets to a certain balance, then I want this amount to go out and you can just automate that, say where it's going to go, or it can just go to your on chain balance and your Albi hub. But nonetheless it just automates all your lightning stuff for you, which is super cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ 55 So here's Albi Hub, more or less all you would do is you'd go to your wallet over on the top right there's something that says swap. It allows you to just swap in or swap out. So like if you want to take some on chain bitcoin and add it to your lightning channel, you can just do that. Or the opposite. If you want to swap out and get some bitcoin off of your lightning node and into cold storage, you can do that without closing the channel or shrinking the size of it. But you can also, up in the top right, hit auto swap and it allows you to say, okay, I want to have X amount of bitcoin in the channel at all times. But if it gets to a certain balance, then I want this amount to go out and you can just automate that, say where it's going to go, or it can just go to your on chain balance and your Albi hub. But nonetheless it just automates all your lightning stuff for you, which is super cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ 54 They added sub wallets. So you have your regular lightning wallet. And you can see here, I've linked it to my nostril. So there's like some zaps from something I shared earlier on. But the sub wallets, for example, you got family members you got kids, whatever. You can create a sub wallet for a kid that is actually using your own Lightning node and it'll just kind of segregate funds for them to be able to utilize, which is super cool as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ 52 I did an interview with Roland from Get Albi, one of the Lightning app developers over there there. I love what they're doing because they. He really got me a lot more bullish on Noster and they're doing Noster and AI integration with Lightning as well too. And it's really cool. It was actually a wonderful experience to get a better understanding of housing like Noster Wallet Connect is making connecting to your Lightning node way easier because previously trying to do that, having it set up on my phone was a pain in the ass, but this just worked seamlessly. I had it set up in an hour. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty intuitive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ . Significance: automated inbound liquidity management and simpler UX reduce operator overhead for sustained Lightning availability.
• Miniscript/Taproot policy tooling: Nunchuk released Miniscript templates; Taproot support was already present 29 They have full support for miniscript. They just released it. I have it like right now. I haven't done anything with it. I haven't started a wallet but now I can totally do a. And they have like some built in templates that you can just select. But if I wanted to I could do a two of three multisig with a three month time lock for any other of this set of keys with like a five of seven and then two of three. The two of three can override it within that three month period. So I can build my own little like mini script. And I don't know exactly how the UX is of like selecting the different pieces and the dependencies or the little tree that you're going to make, you know. But I am so stoked because I've been waiting for this to kind of be a convenient visual tool to utilize. And Rob Hamilton with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 28 But Nunchuck has had Taproot for a while, so I would imagine they're doing miniscript in Taproot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 . Significance: safer, auditable spending policies (timelocks, multisig) with better UX, enabling more robust self‑custody setups.
• Covenants proposals (CTV + CHECKSIGFROMSTACK): talks outlined how most scaling mechanisms rely on pre‑signed transactions; CTV allows committing to transaction templates without multi‑party online coordination, while CHECKSIGFROMSTACK authorizes signatures against arbitrary data. Together they enable re‑authorizing CTV templates off‑chain, improving flexibility for constructs like coin pools and backup/state workflows 44 All right, well to kind of start for context, like every scaling solution that exists for bitcoin except for sidechains, the Lightning network, state chains, arc, bit, vm, all of these rely on pre signed transactions. The entire security model of users funds is whatever set of keys are actually locking the coin. You sign transactions ahead of time, ensuring that funds are distributed how they should be from users. And so that's kind of the core technological bedrock that everything we are doing to try to make sure people can cost effectively transact with. Bitcoin is built on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 43 CTV is essentially kind of a shortcut to creating those pre signed transactions like Doing things. Now you actually have to get all of the users involved together, coordinating to go through that signing process. What CTV would allow you to do is simply define the hash of the transaction that you want to pre sign and you just use that as the address essentially. So you get the exact same kind of guarantees that you would from everybody going through the process of pre signing. But you don't have to go through that coordination getting everyone online together at the same time and actually signing things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 42 Checksig from Stack is kind of a variant of the op checksig code that I mentioned earlier. When you use opcheck sig what that is checking the signature against because you actually have to sign something, it just assumes the transaction that's being verified, that's what was signed, and that's what the signature is being verified against. With Checksig from Stack, you can arbitrarily sign and prove a signature against any data that you verify through the course of that program. And so with these two things together, you can have a massive optimization of the whole pre signing process with CTV and then combining that with checksig from Stack, you can have that hash that effectively commits to the pre signed transaction, be authorized by actually signing and getting everyone together to do that. And so that creates a situation if you structure a program right, you can have the key for checksig from Stack and then the call to verify against a CTV hash. And you can dynamically, without spending the coins on chain, create new CTV hashes that would be valid to spend that coin off chain just using the checksig from Stack signature to resign a new hash every time you need to do this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 41 And you can dynamically, without spending the coins on chain, create new CTV hashes that would be valid to spend that coin off chain just using the checksig from Stack signature to resign a new hash every time you need to do this. And so that creates the possibility of a floating signature essentially where that is not stuck committing to the exact transaction ID that you want to use. It can dynamically change over time. And so given that everything we're building is based on pre signed transactions, this is simultaneously making the whole process of pre signing things much more efficient with CTV and then when combined with Checksig from Stack, it's a lot more flexible in terms of changing things after the fact without having to move those coins on chain and pay blockchain fees for the process of doing that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 40 Well, there's a lot of talk about what it can enable for L2s. So lightning specifically you could do things more efficiently with these constructs called coin pools where you could potentially onboard multiple people onto these L2s at the same time more cost effectively, especially when you are exiting the construct because you could put those constraints in place ahead of time. There's some things in terms of channel state backups with lightning, you only need the latest state so it could be effective there. There are benefits to systems like arc. There are, you know, tons of applications and new constructs that we can work with that both make it, you know, more flexible and more cost efficient. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY . Vaults enabled by covenants add a reversal window for high‑value self‑custody (e.g., delayed spends with pre‑approved recovery paths), reducing loss/coercion risk compared to brittle pre‑signed chains 39 But the thing that gets me really most excited for Covenants is the application of vaults and vaults allows you to essentially, I would say make self custody for an individual much safer. You actually add this new element beyond the application of like, you know, a basic time lock that you could have for a transaction. You add time on your side in a brand new way. So a vault is basically where you could envision you would keep your long term savings. Right? And basically in a vault you can't go in right away, make a payment to an on chain address. You basically go into this lockup state where funds are pending, it's going out the door, but it's going to wait in a predefined period, say two weeks, four weeks, a year, whatever suits your use case the best. And then during that lockup period, at any time you decide, okay, no, I don't want to go forward with this transaction, you can reverse it or send it to a set of predefined addresses that belong to you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 38 So like, let's say worst case scenario, like nightmare situation, you're self custodying your funds, this is your savings. Someone comes into your house, pulls a gun on you, forces you to give up your seed phrase, right? Well now the attacker can't just force you to send to an address, it has to go up through this lock period. So now you have this grace period which hopefully you can, you know, escape that situation and you could reverse course while it's still in that lockup period. So vaults I think are super, super important for making, you know, self custody more safe, right? You don't have to really rely on these third parties or you know, like lawyers or third party signing services like, like a casa or an unchained to be like a third party that has to sign off on every transaction for you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 37 Well it's just the complexity. Like when you, the whole, the whole point of a vault is worst case if somebody steals your money. Like you have this lockup period that Evan was talking about where you can send that back to an address you control so you can stop somebody from stealing your funds. When you try to do that with pre signed transactions, you have to essentially in a long chain of transactions, like define all of this ahead of time, the amounts that you are going to try to withdraw, how much is going to go back into the vault. And once you do that and set that up with pre signed transactions, you can never change any of it. And then another aspect of that is if you ever lose your copies of those pre signed transactions when you do this this way, you should ideally delete the private key that you use to sign those just so somebody can't take that and then like bypass the whole vault system. So if you lose those pre signed transactions you have lost your money. When you actually do this natively with opcodes in Bitcoin itself, you don't have to keep track of those pre signed transactions. There's no key that you have to delete and it's just a lot simpler for a user to manage. So the fact that people aren't doing this in this more complicated way that actually adds new risk to users, I don't think says anything about users desire or lack of a desire for this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 36 When you try to do that with pre signed transactions, you have to essentially in a long chain of transactions, like define all of this ahead of time, the amounts that you are going to try to withdraw, how much is going to go back into the vault. And once you do that and set that up with pre signed transactions, you can never change any of it. And then another aspect of that is if you ever lose your copies of those pre signed transactions when you do this this way, you should ideally delete the private key that you use to sign those just so somebody can't take that and then like bypass the whole vault system. So if you lose those pre signed transactions you have lost your money. When you actually do this natively with opcodes in Bitcoin itself, you don't have to keep track of those pre signed transactions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 35 And with this simple vault construct we can make that a lot more welcoming, much more palatable because you can basically give yourself an undo button. You can say, okay, my cold stored funds, my life savings I put in this special bucket over here that can't be spent from, without a three month delay period or something. And then if I mess up in some way or someone breaks into my house and forces me to move it or something, I know that I have three months to go and like just send that right back. And that gives you a lot of reassurance like when you're, when you're self custodying truly there is, there's no one you can call for help. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY . Pushback: some developers view these as optimizations of existing capabilities and not urgent to activate; a panelist suggested more proofs‑of‑concept and possibly targeting an activation client in 2026 34 Well, I mean I'd say there's two separate sources of a lot of pushback. There's actually a decent amount of developers not really excited or wanting to prioritize activating these things. And that's because you know, like we've kind of gone through most of what you can do with these things are optimize things that you can already do with pre signed transactions like the capabilities that they enable are already possible. Now this is just simplifying like what you need to do to actually implement these things or use these things. And so for a lot of developers, their thought process is this doesn't do enough to justify going through the work of implementing it and activating it on the network. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 33 And then from the end user side of things, it's. I don't want to say entirely, I don't think that would be fair. But I think the vast majority of pushback from users is just much more non technical, less sophisticated users who think that these opcodes are much more powerful than they actually are and that there's the potential they could enable unforeseen things that could come with negative consequences because they don't have a solid understanding of just how simple these are and that all they're doing is optimizing like things that are already possible now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 31 Like to see some more proof of concepts. Although we've seen some great code for vaults, I think people messing around with L2s and developing like new applications like that, some proof of concepts would probably be good. But yeah, I mean really I'd like to see an activation client in 2026. I think, you know, ample time has passed, people have had time to voice their objections. Once we have a few more proof of concepts to really show the strengths of this upgrade, I really like to see something get out the door. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY .

Infrastructure Updates

• Node software and compatibility:
  • v29.1 tag and improvements noted above 91 v29.1 is now tagged: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases/tag/v29.1 . You can build it yourself, bootstrapped from a couple lines of hex: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/contrib/guix/README.md .https://x.com/fanquake/status/1963669344757448801 68 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases/tag/v29.1https://x.com/fanquake/status/1963669344757448801 95 After a longer than usual rc1, a second release candidate for 29.1 is available. This will likely turn into final. Along with a number of bug fixes, 29.1 will improve compact block reconstruction times. It will also reduce the likelihood that your node unexpectedly goes offline.https://x.com/fanquake/status/1963231324770041945 .
  • Some users choose to remain on 29.x and avoid 30.x policy defaults; relay policy backports also affect the 29.x line 10 Running Core 29. Won’t be updating to 30.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n8sp5p/comment/ncib7p8/ 23 I mean, they did backport a bunch of the stuff that's in 30 into the. Into 29 now. So, I mean, it's not like even if you stay on 29 because you don't like 30, you're still going to be, I think by default relaying sub ones app per V byte. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 .
  • Reports that Ashigaru Dojo coinjoin flows require running Core (not Knots) in current setups 50 I got the Ashigaru dojo set up ready to go. I've also got Fediments there. Also, if you're gonna give me about having Core on here, I had to switch it back because Ashi, because of the. In order to do the. The coin join with Ashigaru. It's data, right? And so the data settings there, it's. It requires. From what I've heard from the team there, it requires you to be running Core for that. So I. I swap back for as I'm doing this tutorial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ , and that Knots can’t be combined with Dojo in some Start9 deployments 9 Because Knots will not combine with running Dojo. (Dojo is the Ashigaru/Samourai wallet back end)https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n8sp5p/comment/nchi7t8/ . Significance: node policy and implementation choices can have immediate wallet/tooling implications.
• Node software composition: One video cites Core at ~81.25% of reachable nodes and Knots at ~18.5%, with total node count rising and Knots growing from tens to thousands since early 2024 62 Here, Bitcoin knots nodes, there's well over 4,000 of them now. Bitcoin Core is now sitting at 81 1/4% of the nodes, whereas Bitcoin Knots is 18 1/2% of the nodes. That's up significantly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ 61 Now the interesting part here is that the total node count continues to go up, but the bitcoin core node count has been dropping. And, and not just as a percentage, but as a total of number of nodes. And, and so we've seen an increase in number of nodes being run, we've seen an increase in NOS nodes, a decrease in core nodes. Here's the historical, you know, run of core nodes. We see it take a, take a drop kind of in and around late 24. And here's the chart beside it of the knots nodes, which around the time, same time just went parabolic. Like historically there were not many knots nodes at all. Like as recently as early 2024 there were like 50 or 60. And now we're, now we're looking at thousands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ . A separate user claimed 2–3k additional nodes YTD, “almost all” Knots 8 Data shows about 2-3k additional nodes have come online since YTD. Almost all of them Knots nodes.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n8sp5p/comment/nchozd6/ . Significance: multi‑implementation diversity can increase protocol ossification pressure and raise the cost of unilateral changes 60 But whether or not we get there, I don't know, but it is in my opinion, at least a way of voicing discontent. It's also in the future, in my opinion, when you have an implementation that's like 20% or, or, you know, 30, 40, something like that, it also makes it really, really difficult for one camp to fork Bitcoin in a direction and have everybody kind of go along with it. Even when it comes to soft forks, things like that, it further ossifies the protocol in that it's. It's going to continually be more difficult to make changes. And so I don't view that as a, necessarily a bad thing because we, we've got a very delicate system here and you want to be conservative with development and you know, I don't want random things to break it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ .
• Mining operations and hardware:
  • Ocean Pool reported a step‑function hash increase (including NiceHash participation), reaching ~1.5% of network hash and projecting ~2.5 blocks/day at that share; at times, near‑empty blocks appeared alongside sub‑1 sat/vB relay defaults 19 We jumped up 5x ash yesterday, which was like a 50% growth. It broke something on the pool and like, you know, there was some overflow on the stats. It the pool carried on working, but the website broke and a bunch of weird things happened. The thing that gets me about the spam stuff is that like I, I 100% there are good especially technical and economic arguments for a pro get rid of filters. Like for, for getting rid of filters. Like, I am not saying that there is absolutely no argument that is of interest or worth talking about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 18 We're one and a half percent of the network now. That's no longer like, you know, an embarrassment like that. It was when we were petering along at like 100 pet hash and stuff. Like, we're doing pretty good now. We should be finding two and a half blocks a day on average. So that's, that's pretty good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 17 Though the one Nicehash just mined was a block with hardly any transactions in it because everyone is now sub 1 Sat per V byte enjoying paying nothing. So, yeah, it's ocean's going great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 . Significance: pool hash dynamics and node relay policy interact with observed block composition and fee markets.
  • A roundtable discussion described an open, modular ASIC mining platform with hot‑swappable hash boards, separation of chassis/power/cooling from chips, and a reported 800 TH/s unit; claims included open‑sourcing the platform to reduce vendor lock‑in 16 Their project has now been unveiled and it looks awesome. So they have completely redesigned the entire thinking around how to model. Like your infrastructure is now separate from your asic. So your power block, your encasing, your fans, your, your inverter. Like all of the stuff is now separate from the chips modular. And you have boards that you can swap out and swap back in and in seconds you're running on the new asics. And like so they've, they've literally, they finally made it into infrastructure that can be where you can set up your entire enterprise and you can isolate one board and replace something without shutting anything down. Like without you like it's just like, like swap out to go. Just like you know, in any sort of big data center thing you gotta, you heart swap a hard drive, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 15 It's 800 terahash per second. ASIC miner is their, their like main thing that's amazing modular and it's like three boards inside of it. So like one thing can have a problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 14 Because it open sources everything too. Right. That was the thing. Yeah. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 . Significance: modular, open designs could diversify the hardware supply chain and shorten iteration cycles, though ecosystem adoption remains to be seen.
• Hardware wallet interoperability: COLDCARD emphasized broad compatibility via open standards and warned against single‑app lock‑in; “No lock‑in” was highlighted as a Bitcoin strength 73 Your hardware wallet shouldn’t lock you into using one app.https://x.com/COLDCARDwallet/status/1963693335434125408 72 COLDCARD works with many, built with open standards.https://x.com/COLDCARDwallet/status/1963693335434125408 71 What’s your favorite wallet app to pair with COLDCARD? 👇 https://x.com/COLDCARDwallet/status/1963693335434125408 70 No lock in is a bitcoin super power.https://x.com/nvk/status/1963750638220628474 69 https://x.com/coldcardwallet/status/1963693335434125408https://x.com/nvk/status/1963750638220628474 . Significance: interchangeable wallet stacks support user sovereignty and resilience against vendor failure.

Developer Discussions

• Mempool policy and “filters”: Practitioners debated whether filters “work” and what “work” even means, with suggestions to enumerate definitions to align terminology. A 2023 ten‑part series on mempool and relay policy was referenced for foundational reading 82 GM. Your reminder that filters work and that 80 or 546 aren’t magic lucky numbers.https://x.com/LaurentMT/status/1963573885401505844 83 @ LaurentMT Can you define the theshold for “work”? In my experience they don’t work anymore once some low bar condition is reached.https://x.com/the_charlatan_/status/1963646550418010349 84 @ the_charlatan_ @ LaurentMT Maybe someone could at some point list all of the possible interpretations of “work” in this context and respond to them. Then we could actually agree on terminology and make progress…https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963653803791806674 77 If you are wondering what this whole mempool policy thing is anyway, @ glozow and yours truly wrote a ten part series about mempool and relay policy in 2023. You can find it here: https://bitcoinops.org/en/blog/waiting-for-confirmation/https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963710531887575259 76 https://bitcoinops.org/en/blog/waiting-for-confirmation/https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963710531887575259 . A roundtable cited a BitMEX experiment demonstrating steganographic payloads (e.g., hiding images across key material), underlining that perfect filtering is infeasible—supporters argue partial filters can still shape incentives without enabling censorship 20 Bitmex actually has two things on their blog which I find interesting because one of them is a showing that filters don't work because they, they got together and figured out a way like using just the idea of information theory, which they rightfully point out that the idea that information theory just proves filters it. It's not that you can't like say that information theory is, is a, is a, is a broad spectrum of what we think about how we think about information theory, think about information itself. So they rightfully kind of like caveat the, the notion or the claim. But they say that, you know, basically you can't, you can't stop it because they were able to actually hide a JPEG in private keys, right? And what they did was they created a like kind of like a 15 signature or 15 key system where 14 keys to 14 addresses actually have the, if you, if you release your K value, your, your secret or whatnot, that anybody can actually pull the image from that set of UTXOs. And. But still, because it's locked with there's a 15th, you still have the private key where you're the only one who can move it on chain. But all I could think when I Read the article. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 22 Does that mean that you shouldn't have any filter at all just because some spam leaks through? And it's. Yeah, it's a contradiction as well, because they keep saying at the same time that it's a slippery slope to censorship. And I'm saying the reason that you can still evade spam filters is why they aren't a tool for censorship. That's why I'm all right with them in the first place. And this has been a constant gripe of mine. You can't be concerned about censorship, but also concerned that they sometimes don't work because the two things complement one another. It's yes, a sheep can end up on the wrong side of the fence sometimes, but you still need the fence generally, and it still has an effect that you. Just because a sheep escaped one time doesn't mean you get rid of the fence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 21 And it's. Yeah, it's a contradiction as well, because they keep saying at the same time that it's a slippery slope to censorship. And I'm saying the reason that you can still evade spam filters is why they aren't a tool for censorship. That's why I'm all right with them in the first place. And this has been a constant gripe of mine. You can't be concerned about censorship, but also concerned that they sometimes don't work because the two things complement one another. It's yes, a sheep can end up on the wrong side of the fence sometimes, but you still need the fence generally, and it still has an effect that you. Just because a sheep escaped one time doesn't mean you get rid of the fence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 .
• Inscription load and miner incentives: Adam Back cited growth from 88M to 105M JPEG inscriptions in four months, with ~7,000 BTC in fees paid by May; he reaffirmed that economic nodes—not miners—enforce protocol rules, recalling the blocksize wars, and floated a wallet‑level fee‑routing sketch to favor pools filtering JPEGs while warning of centralization trade‑offs and the “trust‑the‑pool” aspects of sv2/datum 53 in may there were 88mil JPEGs in the chain, now 4 months later, there are 105mil JPEGS, a 20% increase. in may 7000btc fees had been paid, at $100k btc that’s $700m or an average of $8 per JPEG. they are primarily in taproot inscriptions. (@BitMEXResearch data)https://x.com/adam3us/status/1963835584377442653 47 @ BitMEXResearch protocol rules are enforced by economic nodes, miners are just service providers; miners cannot change protocol rules. (everyone learned that counter-intuitive fact during the block-size wars). proof of work, hashrate and bitcoin price come from the real world. there are signalshttps://x.com/adam3us/status/1963836435426885805 45 @ BitMEXResearch the block-size war was won by the market, users set the price in the market. (the protocol can measure consensus valid hashrate which reacts to price. users said NO via the economic force of the market. miners followed, as they are just service providers)https://x.com/adam3us/status/1963837986165895444 48 @ BitMEXResearch users, to deprive pools processing spam of transaction fees. so far it seems hard to do without creating centralization risks of it’s own, but as a sketch wallet sends minimum network fee and rest of dynamic fees to 1 of n multisig of pool addresses that reject JPEGs.https://x.com/adam3us/status/1963846749241409738 49 @ BitMEXResearch that could be enough to make pools not filtering JPEGs even short-term unprofitable vs filtering. the centralizing issues are: solo miners and small pools maybe not in the list, but NB there aren’t many pools. and sv2 and datum can be larger without chosing blocks. i guesshttps://x.com/adam3us/status/1963847304361742407 51 @ BitMEXResearch that could be used to bypass the pool preference, or pools in sv2/datum are “trust the pool” model, the pool could reject pool shares with JPEGs (or anything else they wanted to block), which cuts both ways.https://x.com/adam3us/status/1963847545970360648 .
• OP_RETURN policy debate: Proponents cite protocol needs for small, timely non‑witness attestations via the P2P relay path 74 The point of making it bigger was that some applications want to have a proof of publication for a modicum amount of data (like Lightning does) in case a specific transaction in an offchain protocol is broadcast. This data needs to be in the non-witness part of the transaction, so they can’t use the (cheaper and already-available) inscription mechanism. They also cannot use OP_RETURN outputs because of the misguided 80-byte policy limit on those. If they only wanted to store data onchain, they wouldn’t be too concerned about policy limits. They could just have leveraged private APIs to miners (as they unfortunately already do for other transactions in their protocol), or even just used Libre Relay. But what they are really interested in isn’t to store this small amount of data, is to do so *while using the p2p transaction relay network*. This is why the policy limits were a binding constraint for them, and are not one for people who just want to store arbitrary data onchain regardless of how it gets there. The reason why they want to use the p2p transaction relay network is because their transactions are time-dependant (again, like in Lightning) and the p2p transaction relay network is the best mechanism available today to propagate your transaction to as many miners as possible in a timely manner, while making it hard for an adversary to prevent its propagation.https://x.com/darosior/status/1963628927156388070 ; critics argue it invites non‑monetary bloat 64 Warns that the proposal could turn bitcoin into a dumping ground for non financial transactions spam and undermine its monetary focus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSangw-KCAQ . Luke Dashjr expressed node sovereignty concerns and suggested opt‑in chains for proof‑of‑publication if needed 87 @ darosior @ GrassFedBitcoin @ OrangeSurfBTC Our nodes aren’t yours to decide for.https://x.com/LukeDashjr/status/1963826758127645080 86 @ darosior @ GrassFedBitcoin @ OrangeSurfBTC You could just as well make a new blockchain (even merge mined) for proof of publication and let people opt in… But nooooo you want to force it on people against their willhttps://x.com/LukeDashjr/status/1963838629387903310 .
• Protocol properties and threat models:

  • Bitcoin doesn’t reject valid requests to spend your own money.

  • “Bitcoin relies on users,” with a warning that user co‑option (e.g., botnets) can threaten the system 81 @ IIICapital Bitcoin doesn’t have some centralised entity protecting it. It relies on users. If users let themselves be coopted into a botnet attacking it, of course it will die.https://x.com/LukeDashjr/status/1963823126695018641 . Technical takeaway: decentralization depends on independent, verifying nodes resisting coordinated capture.

Adoption Fundamentals

• Node running and privacy: Users increasingly connect wallets (e.g., Sparrow/Electrum) to their own Core/Knots nodes—often on Umbrel/Start9—citing privacy and verification benefits 2 I run my own node and connect it to Sparrow because it helps give me a little more privacy.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n8sp5p/comment/nci71ks/ 7 You can buy a pre built node like a umbrel home. It’s a complete package with 2 tb storage and is just plug and play essentially. And hook upto it with you pc or phone to configure or use . N if you have the likes of a trezor you can the hook your wallet through your own node.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n8sp5p/comment/nchydde/ 6 I bought an umbrel. Setup was easy as plugging it in in a few spots and some light reading. Away she went.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n8sp5p/comment/nchpm1w/ . Start9 operators noted many listening nodes over Tor, boosting visibility in counts 30 But tying it back into the other topic, like, so many people are buying start OS machines because they want to run knots. Like they. They are continually sold out. Every month they're running out of servers because so many people are buying start OS machines and running knots and all those people doing that are running listening nodes at least over Tor, which means they look great on the stats and that's why we've been growing so fast. Like because a lot of the core nodes out there are non listening nodes because they're just running crudely on a desktop machine. But all the Start OS and umbrella machines and all that, they all listen over Tor. And we had some attacks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 . Guidance threads emphasize that running your own node means you verify rules and transactions yourself, improving privacy and network resilience 13 Yes. Running your own node means you verify your Bitcoin yourself. You don’t have to trust others, you keep your privacy, and you strengthen the network.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n8sp5p/comment/nchh1l5/ 11 Nodes listen for transactions that wallet software sends. They verify the transaction and if valid they pass it along to other nodes. Eventually the transaction is added to the blockchain through mining and the miners broadcast the data about the new block to the nodes which again verify and relay.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n8sp5p/comment/nchzyyq/ 12 It's like a radio relay station. More nodes in geographically and politically different locations make bitcoin more resilient in that it is easier for any other senders or receivers to tune in, so to speak. Also harder to block/censor, either accidentally or on purpose.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n8sp5p/comment/nchzyyq/ .
• Non‑price distribution: Several reports highlight Germany’s high node density (second after the U.S., with many Tor‑hidden nodes; Frankfurt mentioned as a concentration) 4 Germany ranks second when it comes to Bitcoin nodes per country. While there are plenty of known unknowns hidden due to nodes running via TOR it’s still respectable position.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n84g5z/comment/ncc8hfh/ 1 The highest node count after the US is in Germany. The highest node count worldwide is around Frankfurt. There are countless bitcoin meetups in nearly every city and even small towns.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n84g5z/comment/nccbxm4/ . Significance: geographic dispersion of validating nodes strengthens censorship resistance and fault tolerance.
• Operational constraints: Users debate full vs pruned nodes; pruning reduces storage but sacrifices full historical availability some tooling expects 5 That’s because pruned nodes don’t keep the full history — they delete old blocks to save space. For full balance and full verification, run a full node (non-pruned). It uses more storage but gives you complete history, better reliability, and no missing data.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n8sp5p/comment/nchzcet/ . Reported blockchain size estimates vary by source (e.g., ~810 GB in one thread), guiding storage planning 3 The current blockchain size is 810gb with approx increasing 20gb per yearhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n8sp5p/comment/ncia69b/ .
• Merchant/institutional rails: Lightning PoS integration at Square was cited as helpful for de‑facto UX standardization, while wallet QR/format mismatches remain a friction; COINOS was noted for BOLT12 support and simple onboarding; a claim surfaced about self‑custodial tipping on X via Spark (LSP model) 25 I'm super excited that for Square to integrate lightning checkout with their Point of sale system. I like that because it gives kind of a default or kind of a. What do you call it? Like, everyone kind of agrees. Selling point. Yeah. There's just so many formats and different wallets default to different formats. Like when I was buying food from a food truck at the Honey Badger conference, I could pay those invoices with Aqua or Phoenix, but I could not pay those invoices with Cash app because just whatever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 24 There's just so many formats and different wallets default to different formats. Like when I was buying food from a food truck at the Honey Badger conference, I could pay those invoices with Aqua or Phoenix, but I could not pay those invoices with Cash app because just whatever. Like the. And it wasn't a lightning channel issue. It was a. It's a wallet, you know, QR format code or whatever. Lightning address format. So it's like, like we can have all of these special ones, but like there has to be one that works and that one has to be the default one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 27 But we're working on a white label of coinos. COINOS IO is this cool thing a guy made that just. It's like the most unscalable but beautifully practical way to onboard someone in bitcoin possible. It's just like. It's like two buttons. You go on COINOS IO. Not sponsored, by the way. I just like this product. It's not what. It's one of the few ways ocean miners can get paid out over lightning as well, because it supports bolt 12. It's super custom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 26 Then Bitbit launches self custodial tipping on X powered by Spark. So I saw this and I still don't understand how it is. I couldn't figure out, I didn't go deep enough to figure out how to like get it, but it apparently works. You can do it now and you can tip people's usernames. And self custodial. I don't, I, I don't, I don't, I'm telling you, I don't get it. I don't get it yet. And I'm questionable on some of the claims that they have because of that. But yeah, according to the article and some of the things that were posted, they this is what it is. It's self custodial tipping on X. It's powered by Spark. So Spark is the, it's basically like an LSP and a. They have like a SDK. It's a little bit like Breeze in that way you can tip to people's usernames and there's a, it says 21 day wallet creation window. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 . Significance: tooling convergence and reliable LN addressability are prerequisites for mainstream retail flows.

Cultural Evolution

• Governance reality emphasized by developers: Core cannot unilaterally change rules; activation depends on what users and businesses choose to run 32 Yeah, I mean, it's just there is no organizational structure to Bitcoin. Like, it's very common for people to look at Bitcoin core developers as some organization in charge or some authority that is able to make decisions for the network as a whole. And at the end of the day, that that's not how this works. Like, the. The network is composed out of all of us running the software that we run, like actually participating in the network. And at the end of the day, it does not matter what core developers build or don't build. Something will not go live on the network unless all of us choose to run that software, unless businesses actually conducting economic activity choose to run that software. And so this perception that core developers have some authority is exactly inverted from the actual reality. All of us do, all of the people running businesses actually making transactions on the network. We're the ones who decide whether something activates or doesn't activate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY . Historical precedent (blocksize conflict) is framed as market‑driven user consensus enforcing limits, with miners following as service providers 47 @ BitMEXResearch protocol rules are enforced by economic nodes, miners are just service providers; miners cannot change protocol rules. (everyone learned that counter-intuitive fact during the block-size wars). proof of work, hashrate and bitcoin price come from the real world. there are signalshttps://x.com/adam3us/status/1963836435426885805 45 @ BitMEXResearch the block-size war was won by the market, users set the price in the market. (the protocol can measure consensus valid hashrate which reacts to price. users said NO via the economic force of the market. miners followed, as they are just service providers)https://x.com/adam3us/status/1963837986165895444 .
• Node sovereignty in practice: “Our nodes aren’t yours to decide for,” and proposals to use opt‑in auxiliary chains rather than pushing policies onto unwilling operators 87 @ darosior @ GrassFedBitcoin @ OrangeSurfBTC Our nodes aren’t yours to decide for.https://x.com/LukeDashjr/status/1963826758127645080 86 @ darosior @ GrassFedBitcoin @ OrangeSurfBTC You could just as well make a new blockchain (even merge mined) for proof of publication and let people opt in… But nooooo you want to force it on people against their willhttps://x.com/LukeDashjr/status/1963838629387903310 . Reinforcing ethos: “No lock‑in is a bitcoin super power” 70 No lock in is a bitcoin super power.https://x.com/nvk/status/1963750638220628474 .
• Mempool policy norms: Ongoing debates weigh anti‑abuse heuristics against censorship concerns; some argue imperfect filters can still shape behavior without central control 21 And it's. Yeah, it's a contradiction as well, because they keep saying at the same time that it's a slippery slope to censorship. And I'm saying the reason that you can still evade spam filters is why they aren't a tool for censorship. That's why I'm all right with them in the first place. And this has been a constant gripe of mine. You can't be concerned about censorship, but also concerned that they sometimes don't work because the two things complement one another. It's yes, a sheep can end up on the wrong side of the fence sometimes, but you still need the fence generally, and it still has an effect that you. Just because a sheep escaped one time doesn't mean you get rid of the fence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 .

Pointers and References

• Mempool/relay policy series (2023) 77 If you are wondering what this whole mempool policy thing is anyway, @ glozow and yours truly wrote a ten part series about mempool and relay policy in 2023. You can find it here: https://bitcoinops.org/en/blog/waiting-for-confirmation/https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963710531887575259 76 https://bitcoinops.org/en/blog/waiting-for-confirmation/https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963710531887575259
• BIP 153 (sendtemplate) assignment and PR 93 “Sharing Block Templates with Peers” aka `sendtemplate` by @ ajtowns has been assigned BIP 153.https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963708947610886525 92 https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1937https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963708947610886525
• Core v29.1 release artifacts and notes 91 v29.1 is now tagged: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases/tag/v29.1 . You can build it yourself, bootstrapped from a couple lines of hex: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/contrib/guix/README.md .https://x.com/fanquake/status/1963669344757448801 68 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases/tag/v29.1https://x.com/fanquake/status/1963669344757448801 97 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/v29.1rc2/doc/release-notes.mdhttps://x.com/bitcoincoreorg/status/1961424587679232299 96 https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-29.1/test.rc2/https://x.com/bitcoincoreorg/status/1961424587679232299

Protocol Development

• Bitcoin Core v29.1rc2 is available for testing; after a longer-than-usual rc1, rc2 will likely become the final 29.1 release. The update includes bug fixes, faster compact block reconstruction, and changes that reduce the likelihood of nodes unexpectedly going offline 101 A new release candidate of Bitcoin Core, v29.1rc2, is available for testing. This is a new minor release, and follows v29.0. Release notes: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/v29.1rc2/doc/release-notes.md Binaries are available here: https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-29.1/test.rc2/https://x.com/bitcoincoreorg/status/1961424587679232299 98 After a longer than usual rc1, a second release candidate for 29.1 is available. This will likely turn into final. Along with a number of bug fixes, 29.1 will improve compact block reconstruction times. It will also reduce the likelihood that your node unexpectedly goes offline.https://x.com/fanquake/status/1963231324770041945 . Release notes and test binaries are published 100 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/v29.1rc2/doc/release-notes.mdhttps://x.com/bitcoincoreorg/status/1961424587679232299 99 https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-29.1/test.rc2/https://x.com/bitcoincoreorg/status/1961424587679232299 . Technical impact: faster block reconstruction can lower propagation latency during block relay; the stability fix reduces unplanned node downtime—both effects improve network robustness.

• Jameson Lopp reports contributing code to the Bitcoin Core v30 release and is already running it 68 I contributed code to the Bitcoin Core v30 release and I’m already running it.https://x.com/lopp/status/1963299424790090012 . Signal: active developer participation and early field use help surface issues ahead of broader adoption.

• Script upgrades under discussion

  • Taproot’s OP_SUCCESS “escape hatches” enable soft‑fork activation of future stack‑modifying opcodes; advocates argue this makes OP_CAT (string concatenation) a feasible narrow upgrade sooner than broader packages 41 The upgrade that I've been championing for the, for the last couple of years is just string concatenation in Bitcoin script. I mean the Taproot upgrade that happened four years ago was specifically designed and came with a bunch of new opcodes called OP successes which are designed to purpose. They were specifically designed so that you could soft fork in stack modifying opcodes as a soft fork into bitcoin. So some people may not know this, but for example, if you take dogecoin, which doesn't have Segwit or Taproot, you cannot do opcat as, as a soft fork on dogecoin. It would be a hard fork. But bitcoin is specifically like designed to allow these like string concatenation to be soft for in. And if you take the authors of the Taproot BIP and you and you poll them, I guarantee you that two out of three, Peter Willey, Andrew Polstra and Gregory Maxwell, two out of three of those people will either say that they are surprised or disappointed that this has not happened yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 32 Yes. I basically think of Great script restoration as a like nice rebranding of like opcat like packages in a way that people more easily, you know, drink without thinking that it's poison because it's like been packaged very well by Rusty and works for blockstream. We used to. Where does it work now? Well, I think the kind of the logic behind that is we know most of the things people would want to do with App CAT if we activated that on its own right now. And a lot of the other OPCO codes that would be reactivated in the great script restoration just provide like simpler, more efficient and concise ways of doing those things. So that rather than the clunky block space inefficient opcat versions, people could just directly use those other opcodes in combination with opcat to just keep things more cost effective, easier to ensure that they're going to behave and operate correct correctly, like things along those lines. But great script restoration is not going to happen in like four years. Realistically. Bobcat could happen like next year if we wanted to. So it's like thinking about upgrades like four years into the future when we have no idea what the consensus climate or prospects are going to be of changing the, the protocol. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU . Technical significance: OP_CAT would let Script concatenate byte strings—a primitive needed to construct Merkle structures and compact on‑chain verifiers.

  • “There’s no button for concatenating strings… Turns out that if you can concatenate things and you can hash things, you can build Merkle trees inside Bitcoin script.” 40 So Bitcoin script, you can think of it like a very basic calculator. There are different buttons. There's like a button for addition, a button for. Actually there's not a button for multiplication, unfortunately. There's a button for SHA hashing, there's no button for concatenating strings. And if you ever use like a Linux computer and you've looked at the manual, concatenation is like one of the most basic primitives of computer programming. Turns out that if you can concatenate things and you can hash things, you can build Merkle trees inside Bitcoin script. If you can Merkle things in Bitcoin script, you can build stark verifiers. And what we were talking about earlier, stark verification, ZK verification is the. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU

  • The “Great Script Restoration” (GSR) vision would reactivate many legacy opcodes and add simple covenants, paired with a resource‑limiting mechanism (an Ethereum‑like “gas” equivalent) to mitigate DoS risk; panelists framed it as a multi‑year effort 33 That's the great script restoration. Yes. So what's the process of. The progress of that is that I. Think Rusty's been kind of slowly chipping at that, but he also works full time for Blockstream's Lightning implementation. So it's not something he. He's working on full time. And for those unfamiliar with that, the idea is essentially to add a couple of simple covenants to Bitcoin as well as reactivate most of the old opcodes that satoshi deactivated in 2010 with a. Probably gonna piss some people off with this. But essentially an equivalent of gas and Ethereum. So a way to rate limit the resources that those opcodes use on your node when they're being verified to kind of ensure that nodes can't be denial of service attacked or crashed off of the network. I think the long term that would be a very sound goal to work towards. The problem is just convincing enough developers to actually take an interest and get involved in moving that forward because it just frankly, Rusty does not have the time or the bandwidth to do that alone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU .
  • Covenants (e.g., CTV, CheckSigFromStack) are presented as minimal, useful additions that remove reliance on large sets of pre‑signed transactions by natively constraining future spends in Script; progress remains gradual and contested 37 Well, so the basic way that Bitcoin works is you, when you create an address, what you're actually doing is defining a little computer program that defines the proof that you have to provide in order to spend those Coins. And all of these programs can do is restrict the kind of ability to spend. But once you've provided that proof and met that condition, you can spend the coin however you want, wherever you want you. You can burn the coins forever if you want. The idea of a covenant is to have little primitives you can include in that program that restrict how it can be spent. So it's not just proving that you're allowed to spend it, but now these extra restrictions could say limit it so that they can only be sent to a certain number of predefined places or like including other data or commitments with it. And the idea is that when you are trying to build these layer two protocols that interact with a lot of off chain data, that's essentially what you want to do. You want to take the coins locked up in that layer two and restrict how they can be spent. And that's done very clunkily right now with pre signed transactions. And that's kind of the only mechanism we have to do that with covenants. You can natively enforce that in Bitcoin scripting system itself. And like Liam said, you no longer have to go through the process of signing what could potentially be a massive set of pre signed transactions. You just define the logic of how you want to restrict coins and include that in this little locking program. And it simplifies a lot of the setup process, the overhead in that, it's just a lot cleaner and simpler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 35 We're very gradually, I think, making progress with check template, verify CTV and check sig from stack like essentially the most basic simple covenants out there. I wouldn't say that they're going to get turned on or activated tomorrow or they. There's like a mob screaming to turn them on now, but people are slowly coming to consensus that this is the bare minimum set of new functionality that everybody agrees would be useful and just kind of moves us a little bit forward. Is there even consensus on this panel for that? No. I mean, you're wrong, shinobi, you're losing the battle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU . Impact: cleaner primitives for vaults and L2 protocol scaffolding, potentially improving safety and operational simplicity.
  • Researchers emphasize L1’s current privacy/throughput shortfalls and argue that enabling on‑chain ZK verification (SNARK/STARK) would simplify private, scalable proofs; until then, optimistic designs (BitVM) and newer “Glock” constructions shift complexity off‑chain 43 I think, I don't think it scales. And it's not private. There's a lot of things that are lacking. So Bitcoin isn't fungible because it's not private and everybody can track everything you're doing. So if we want those properties that bitcoin was supposed to have, I don't think in its current form it's possible without something like snark verification. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 42 I think the research has been progressing well and we can get pretty close. But if we could just do snark verification on Bitcoin, everything would be a lot simpler and better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 39 People might have heard of the Bit VM line of work. I think of what I'm working on is the next evolution of that. So because we don't have OPCAD and we don't have the ability to verify a snark directly on chain, we have these like kind of what are called optimistic protocols. So instead of verifying a proof, you like claim that a proof is valid and then I can prove that it's not like invalid. So it's like a two step thing. And so if you're cheating, I can prove it and that can be verified on Bitcoin. So one way this was done previously was with bitvm. It was very expensive. This new technique of Glock using garbled circuits moves all of the, or essentially all the complexity off chain. So I think these protocols are becoming quite practical. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU .
  • Trust‑minimized bridges: multiple teams (e.g., Farragut Labs, Starknet, Citrea) are reported to be reducing script size and capital inefficiencies compared to earlier BitVM attempts—an inflection described as “the screws are starting to come off” 44 I actually do think that there's some actual legitimacy to the current efforts at building trust, minimized bridges to other execution environments on bitcoin. What we've had going on for like the last couple of years now is that there's actually been some reintroduction of actual brain power back into bitcoin. People like Liam, for example, there's actually. So people thought that the, you know, the rootstock sidechain, for example, that the no one, they've basically been counted out. No one's really paying any attention to what they're doing. But they have some pretty good cryptographers there. They're working under research group called Farragut Labs. We also have the starknet team, we have the Citra guys. And sorry if I'm missing any major ones, but I guess I get Robin Linus and the Siri SYNC TEAM all of these teams have, for a couple of years now really been trying to come up with these ugly quirks and weird hacks in the bitcoin protocol. And in only like the last couple of months am I starting to see like, it's kind of like a. I don't know how to describe it. Like it's. If you're trying to like unscrew something and you need like some grease, like you need some gravel in a chain or like to get grip around the screw for the things to start to come off, I think, Liam, you can sort of resonate with this. The, the screws are starting to come off and some of the ugliest properties of Bit VM bridges, the size of the scripts and the capital inefficiencies. I'm starting to finally see that there might be a path that we can build trust minimized bridges that are maybe good. They're not completely useless. There may actually there's starting to be some light at the end of the tunnel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU .

Lightning & Layer-2 Progress

• Lightning merchant UX: ARC removed vendor‑side channel management/inbound‑liquidity concerns and was used for point‑of‑sale purchases at a conference; the implementation did not require a soft fork 5 I mean, honestly, like the thing that, to the points that were being made earlier, I was in Riga with, with you, Ben, and they had ARC up and running over there. This was such a big deal from a payments technology standpoint because now you don't have, if you're a vendor, you don't even have to think about channel management. You don't have to worry about whether you have inbound liquidity in a channel. It's all been taken care of. For people that just don't have the technical chops to be dealing with all of that, that's a really big deal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZkvWvtGx0s 4 And when I see things like that in Riga for the first time, and just for some context, a year before that, I took a pitch from some of the engineers on Ark and we were being told, yeah, we think it's going to need a soft fork in order to do this. But they weren't quite sure. Lo and behold, a year later, it didn't need a soft fork. They figured out a way to do it. And its work, it literally was being used to, to buy sandwiches outside of the conference and they didn't tell anyone either. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZkvWvtGx0s . Impact: lower operational burden for merchants improves real‑world Lightning acceptance.

• Blockspace economics: “₿apps are filling Bitcoin blocks,” with a view that a rollup like Citrea could price out low‑value spam by raising the cost of blockspace usage 67 ₿apps are filling Bitcoin blocks. https://x.com/citrea_xyz/status/1963272707493257319 66 There’s a potential future in which Citrea solves the spam problem by pricing out stupid low value use of block space. A very entertaining future. 😏 https://x.com/citrea_xyz/status/1963272707493257319https://x.com/lopp/status/1963277958186999881 . Impact: L2 competition for scarce L1 bandwidth strengthens the fee market, which is a primary spam‑mitigation mechanism.

• Liquid sidechain: Simplicity smart contracts are live on Liquid mainnet; getting started requires no Bitcoin soft fork. Developer flow: write in SimplicityHL → compile to Simplicity → deploy to Liquid; the language aims for higher expressiveness with stronger safety guarantees than Script 77 Simplicity is now live on @ Liquid_BTC mainnet.https://x.com/Blockstream/status/1963385467807908084 75 You don’t need a soft fork to get started.https://x.com/Blockstream/status/1963385469645078653 73 Write in SimplicityHL → compile to Simplicity → deploy to @ Liquid_BTC . https://x.com/Blockstream/status/1950952316766425438https://x.com/Blockstream/status/1963385469645078653 76 In 2017, Blockstream set out to develop a smart contract language that outperforms Bitcoin Script and EVM, offering more expressiveness with stronger safety assurances. Eight years later, we believe we’ve done it. https://x.com/Blockstream/status/1950952316766425438 . Technical framing from the launch thread:

  Every opcode you’ve ever wanted can be built today with Simplicity.

• Trust‑minimized bridges and L2 proofs: newer BitVM‑style constructions (e.g., Glock/garbled circuits) move nearly all complexity off‑chain while keeping fraud proofs verifiable on Bitcoin—more practical today, though still constrained without covenants or native ZK verification 39 People might have heard of the Bit VM line of work. I think of what I'm working on is the next evolution of that. So because we don't have OPCAD and we don't have the ability to verify a snark directly on chain, we have these like kind of what are called optimistic protocols. So instead of verifying a proof, you like claim that a proof is valid and then I can prove that it's not like invalid. So it's like a two step thing. And so if you're cheating, I can prove it and that can be verified on Bitcoin. So one way this was done previously was with bitvm. It was very expensive. This new technique of Glock using garbled circuits moves all of the, or essentially all the complexity off chain. So I think these protocols are becoming quite practical. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 38 So like they require pre signing. If we had some kind of covenant mechanism, we could do these protocols without pre signing. Asterisk. You know, it's like a lot of details that this is, you know, glossing over. But do you have a preferred one? Whichever one is most likely to like work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU .

Infrastructure Updates

• Mining fleet management: Braiins released a free Manager upgrade with a revamped workers list/details UI, improved batch actions, full Braiins OS fleet control (install, tune, manage), and auto‑boot for Cvitek boards to maximize uptime 72 Braiins Manager Upgrade is Here!https://x.com/BraiinsMining/status/1963244390446497842 71 The big news for ALL users: ✅ Revamped Workers List & Worker Details UI. ✅ Improved batch actions workflow.https://x.com/BraiinsMining/status/1963244390446497842 70 Running Braiins OS? It gets even better. ✅ Complete control: Install, tune, and manage your fleet. ✅ New batch actions for precise device handling. ✅ Auto-boot for Cvitek boards to maximize uptime.https://x.com/BraiinsMining/status/1963244390446497842 69 The best mining firmware now has a FREE manager to match.https://x.com/BraiinsMining/status/1963244390446497842 . Impact: reduced operational overhead and downtime, especially useful for smaller operators.

• Node data handling and local storage

  • Chainstate stores only the UTXO set; since v28.0, blocks are obfuscated on disk—casual scanning will not detect embedded data without explicit tooling 96 @ EricSirion @ PraveenPerera @ Rob1Ham Chainstate stores the UTXO set, blocks are getting obfuscated since v28.0 via https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/28052https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963229015407505791 95 @ PraveenPerera @ Rob1Ham It’s already obfuscated, so at least your average scanning software won’t detect it. You have to be looking for such embedded data explicitly. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6650https://x.com/EricSirion/status/1963182719526924786 .
  • OP_RETURN payloads are stored as contiguous byte blocks and directly recognizable on disk; representing on‑chain bytes as images/video requires external software to interpret them 94 The OP_RETURN data is stored as a contiguous block of data, so an image is an image on your disk, directly recognizable, no scripts needed, no transformation needed.https://x.com/PraveenPerera/status/1962991805454041518 93 @ Rob1Ham The bottom line is OP_RETURN is an image on disk, inscriptions aren’t without doing something. The rest I don’t know i’m not a lawyer.https://x.com/PraveenPerera/status/1962993295619174823 92 There are 0 pictures on the bitcoin block chain. Bitcoin stores arrays of bytes in scripts, witnesses, and outputs (op return).https://x.com/Rob1Ham/status/1962984465279373762 91 For it to be in any other format (picture, video, gif etc), requires extra software to transform it.https://x.com/Rob1Ham/status/1962984465279373762 .
  • Operator takeaway: debates about “what’s on the network” vs “what sits on your node” are distinct; storage/obfuscation behavior affects local operational and compliance posture 59 @ Rob1Ham The argument is not about the network it’s about what’s on your node.https://x.com/PraveenPerera/status/1962991805454041518 .

• Funding decentralized infra: a proposal suggests non‑profit funders pivot support toward shared‑UTXO hubs—recalling earlier non‑profit support for competing Lightning implementations—to promote more decentralized infrastructure 97 There was a time when the non-profit guys in BTC came in and helped the profit seeking companies by funding competing LN implementations but for altruism. Maybe now is a good time for those guys to pivot funds over to shared UTXO hubs to help promote decentralized infrastructure.https://x.com/alexbosworth/status/1963281589720461641 . Impact: broader multi‑party UTXO patterns and operator participation.

Developer Discussions

• OP_RETURN limits, mempool policy, and miner decentralization

  • A thread (inspired by a BitMEXResearch article) argues inscription/OP_RETURN traffic adds miner revenue; if some miners exclude it, defectors who include it earn more. This motivates private mempools/out‑of‑band submission, which skews fee estimation, disadvantages smaller miners (who can’t afford private mempools), slows propagation, and raises stale rates—effects that disproportionately favor large operations 88 0/ I just noticed @ BitMEXResearch ’s article from May on “Removing Bitcoin’s Guardrails”. It does a great job summarizing the case for removing the OP_RETURN limit.https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963319259066765414 87 2/ Mining is a competitive industry where profit margins are low. Inscription and OP_RETURN transactions present an attractive source of revenue to miners, potentially increasing their profits.https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963319261616894351 86 3/ Asking miners to decline this additional revenue on principle creates a situation in which conformists build their block templates from a subset of the available transactions. Especially if there are few defectors, this can significantly increase the revenue of defectors.https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963319262782816436 85 4/ If there is established financial interest in sending some types of transactions, but the network unreliably relays those transactions, would-be defectors are financially incentivized to loosen mempool policy, operate private mempools, and offer out-of-band submission tools.https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963319263953051988 84 5/ Creating and maintaining private mempools adds a cost that smaller miners are unlikely to afford themselves. Vice versa, senders are unlikely to expend the effort to submit to any but the private mempools associated with the most hashrate.https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963319265282642367 83 6/ This leads to a situation in which nodes on the network only see an incomplete mempool. This presents a financial disadvantage for small and new miners, skews feerate estimation, because users are not aware of all competing bids on blockspace, and slows block propagation.https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963319266532626829 82 7/ Slower block propagation means an increased rate of stale blocks, so this must surely mean that the miners including non-standard transactions in their blocks are more likely to lose a block to a competing block, right?https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963319267715428653 81 8/ Absolutely—but it’s more complicated! More conflicting blocks increase the stale rate for all miners, not just the miners that create the slower blocks. When conflicting blocks are found, the authors of the blocks generally mine on top of their own blocks, …https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963319268935868564 80 9/ …while other miners usually mine on the block they see first. While the slower blocks will be seen by a slightly smaller proportion of the remaining hashrate, large operations have an advantage here, because they have a larger portion of the total hashrate already.https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963319270118756809 79 10/ Additionally, larger operations are more likely to be well-connected, and, as established above, more likely aware of controversial txs. This means that they are more likely to receive offending blocks without a delay, reducing the advantage of the conformist block.https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963319271192498673 78 11/ In sum, larger ops who already have an efficiency of scale, are disproportionately favored by mixed acceptance of txs. They are more likely to have access to the additional revenue, less likely to be punished for authoring slow blocks, and less likely to create stale blocks.https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963319272492634422 .

  • “Creating and maintaining private mempools adds a cost that smaller miners are unlikely to afford themselves.” 84 5/ Creating and maintaining private mempools adds a cost that smaller miners are unlikely to afford themselves. Vice versa, senders are unlikely to expend the effort to submit to any but the private mempools associated with the most hashrate.https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1963319265282642367

• Relay filters and topology: an explainer highlighted why filters “don’t work well” given tolerant‑minority dynamics, and how preferential peering affects mempool relay 65 good explainer from @ brian_trollz https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/the-bitcoin-mempool-relay-network-dynamics and from may (4 months ago long before the drama). with diagrams and good intuition for WHY filters don’t work well, the “tolerant minority” sort of breaks the filters, and preferential peering also explained.https://x.com/adam3us/status/1963267121623773243 . Implication: policy knobs that rely on near‑universal adherence may be brittle in practice.

• Scope clarification: commenters note the current debate is mempool policy, not consensus. Transactions carrying arbitrary data remain valid by consensus; nodes can trim or adjust local storage without changing consensus 8 No, it's not a consensus change, it's a mempool policy change. Transactions filled with illicit jpegs are still valid according to the consensus.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n78nsx/comment/nc5s063/ 7 It's much simpler than that. Nodes can just opt to not store that part. Trimmed chains like Knots basically already do this.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n78nsx/comment/nc5tg4g/ 6 It has nothing to do with forks/consensushttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n78nsx/comment/nc5so7j/ .

• Legal surface area: community members asked developers to address potential legal exposure from large OP_RETURN transactions and to share any legal reviews 90 @ adam3us @ LukeDashjr Why don’t you address instead the concerns raised by many around potential legal challenges introduced by large OP RETURN transactions?https://x.com/CunyRenaud/status/1963307299843297454 89 Has your (or any) legal team examined this? What are their conclusions? Can you please share so everybody is on the same page?https://x.com/CunyRenaud/status/1963307299843297454 . Operational implication: jurisdictional risk may influence node policy and organizational governance, regardless of consensus validity.

• Data‑size accounting: Adam Back contends some critiques conflate payload with formatting overhead; while formatting incurs cost, the usable payload size remains “as advertised” 61 that’s misleading because the limit is the usable data excluding the formatting, he’s chosen to talk about the total including the formatting and split it into 1 byte chunks so the formatting dominates to amplify the misleading assertion. yes the formatting costs, but the payloadhttps://x.com/adam3us/status/1963302979496243696 60 size is as advertised.https://x.com/adam3us/status/1963303036538831211 .

Adoption Fundamentals

• Deterministic keys and backups: Wallets derive all addresses from a 12/24‑word seed (BIP39/BIP32); a wallet does not store history—blockchain data is matched using deterministically regenerated addresses 58 Okay, so yeah, like a typical setup would be, let's say you have a phone wallet and then you generate a new wallet or you create a new wallet and it will usually there will be an option for backup or it might show you at the start and you'll write down 12 words. And basically what matters is you need to write down those 12 words in the correct order. So it's normally 12 or 24, but nowadays it's usually 12. That's what it looks like typically for a phone self custodial setup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg 57 So just to explain that, just for people who are new, when you write down those 12 words, you can think of that like it's a representation of your master private key. It's representing that private key and this private key, once it's, you know, let's say ingested or imported into a different hardware wallet because they're using the same or similar standards known as BIP 39, BIP 32 and so on. Different standards. But the point is you could take the same, like the same 12 words into another hardware wallet or into another device, and when you go to actually generate addresses, it'll generate the same addresses and you will have the same balance. So this is another, I guess, kind of a bit of a mind bending concept, right? Like you might be used to this concept. If you're not used to this, you might be thinking, oh, it's like a word file and I hit save and I've saved my transactions. No, this is actually different. When you write down those 12 words, it's not just the backup of the coins you already have received, it's all the future addresses that will be generated on those keys. So it's sort of like you can generate billions of addresses and the, the same 12 words is the backup not just for coins you receive for now, but into the future on that wallet. Because it's a bit of a, bit of a kind of a mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg 56 Because remember, your transaction history is not actually stored in your wallet. Wallet's almost a misleading term for what it is. It's all in confusing ways sometimes. Yeah, it's because all of the transaction history that you've ever done is actually on the Bitcoin blockchain. So using only that set of seed words, all of the addresses that you'll ever use are deterministically generated from that. So therefore they could be deterministically generated, generated again if you get a new wallet. And then all of the transactions on all of those addresses could be easily matched up as they're stored on the Bitcoin blockchain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg . Treat a hardware wallet as a signing device (a “pen”), not the sole storage location; backups can be restored on compatible devices 46 The hardware wallet is more like a. I don't want to confuse you even more, but it's more like a pen than it's a pen for signing with the secret rather than a place to store the seed. You can also have backups and you could have many, many, many of these backups. So another thing in your journey that will make you feel extremely confident is when you do lose a backup and you realize, oh, I can just go and get the other one from behind my parents house or wherever and restore the same wallet again on a whole new device or a different, different wallet or something and realize that you are independent even from losing these backups. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg .

• Security hygiene: do not photograph, speak aloud, or type seed words into internet‑connected devices; enter seeds only on the hardware device itself 53 It might display on the screen of the hardware wallet and then it's important that you write that down. But also it's important that you don't take a picture of it, you don't tell anybody. And also don't just be aware that if somebody comes to you saying, hey, I'm from the support company, tell me your 12 words. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg 55 In fact, it shouldn't touch the digital realm in any way whatsoever. As Stefan said, that includes even speaking out the words aloud where it might be able to be overheard or recorded, even, as Stephane said, taking effect. We should assume that every one of your computer devices, whether it's a phone or a computer, is inherently insecure. And so what we're doing with Bitcoin, securing your own keys, is we're bringing cybersecurity in this case, but it's bringing it back into the physical realm. We don't actually want that information in the digital realm at all because it's vulnerable. So we. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg .

“Never put your seed words into an online connected device for your life savings.” 54 Basically, if you listen to any reputable educator, all of them will tell you, never put your seed words into an online connected device for your life savings. Now, it's one thing if you got like a phone wallet for small amounts, that's a different kettle of fish. But if we're talking about your life savings or a large amount of your savings, never put that into an online connected computer or device. Any other, I guess, key tips that you want to share for people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg

• Backups and durability: maintain multiple copies, periodically test restores, and consider steel‑based media (washers/plates) for fire/flood resilience 52 But with your bitcoin seed words, you can make multiple copies of that and keep it in multiple secure locations. And again, it's a more advanced topic, but it's also possible to have more than one key such that you need more than one of them brought together in order to spend the money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg 51 So there are, there are a few like steps in your bitcoin journey of custody that will be really, really meaningful to you. And one of them, the first one is when you actually take self Custody, you, you have a seed phrase, you back it up somewhere. The experience of seeing all your Bitcoin in a wallet, deleting the wallet and then making a new one, maybe even in a different software, using the same seed words and seeing all of your coins is magically back again, is like unlike anything else in how to manage finances. So just to explain that, just for people who are new, when you write down those 12 words, you can think of that like it's a representation of your master private key. It's representing that private key and this private key, once it's, you know, let's say ingested or imported into a different hardware wallet because they're using the same or similar standards known as BIP 39, BIP 32 and so on. Different standards. But the point is you could take the same, like the same 12 words into another hardware wallet or into another device, and when you go to actually generate addresses, it'll generate the same addresses and you will have the same balance. So this is another, I guess, kind of a bit of a mind bending concept, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg 50 The other thing you can do with your backups is rather than just have them written down on a. Oh yes, written down on a piece of paper, think about what might happen if there's a fire or a flood or something like that. And so there are many products now in the bitcoin world. In fact, there's even DIY solutions that make it very simple to stamp these seed words into things like a stack of stainless steel washers that can be then put on a, put on, screwed together on a bolt and you can store that so you can have it that way. Or things like seed plates, seed plate. Where it's like a metal thing that you stamp. The idea being is it's essentially indestructible should, you know, should your house burn down, it's bad enough having that happen to lose your life savings as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg .

• Multisignature for resilience and inheritance: M‑of‑N (e.g., 2‑of‑3) adds redundancy and geographic separation; some hardware can be initialized together (daisy‑chained) then separated. Community‑built devices (e.g., Frostnap) and collaborative‑custody services can assist without taking control 49 So the basic concept that we talked about is using a seed phrase, which is a private key to sign a transaction. But you can build your addresses such that you don't need just one to spend. You could build it so that you need to Sign with, say, two keys out of a total of three, and this gives you some redundancy. This means that if you were to lose one of those keys, you can still recover all of your Bitcoin. It's a similar thing to the backup. But this also allows you to separate how you store these keys, maybe in different places around the world. If you've got lots and lots of bitcoin, maybe you want some to live in a different continent or something. This is more advanced stuff. But there's lots further you can go with bitcoin than just the basic one key seed phrase. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg 48 There are now hardware wallets, it's called Frostnap, actually. You may want to look them up. I don't have any financial affiliation with them whatsoever. It's just something that's emerged from our community and we're naturally proud of, of those things that happen. But these are hardware wallets that link together. They start off linked together. So if you're going to do something like, let's say a 2 of 3 multi signature, you need to sign two keys out of any possible three in order to spend the money. You would start off with the three hardware wallets essentially daisy chained together, all plugged in together and you set them up in one go. And once you've set that up, you can then geographically separate the three wallets. So perhaps you might leave one with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg 47 By the way, it's not just 2 of 3. You could have 3 of 4 or 2 of 5, M of N is how it's described. And you could use these Frostnap wallets, just depending on what the N is, is how many wallets you need. And you could create from that any scheme you want. And if you want to spend, you bring the appropriate number of wallets back together and can spend the Money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg 29 I think one of the most important non communication consensus things that we can do right now is work on collaborative custody solutions. Things like unchained casa, nunchuck, like ways where users can have full self custody over their own funds, but another signer or a service provider can essentially be a helping hand, like protect you against some degree of key loss or mistakes that you made or you know, wallet compromises to, to ensure that your funds do not completely disappear if you mess something up with your key management. And I think in the short term that could be a huge difference maker in terms of getting people to actually self custody their own coins instead of just leave them on exchanges or purchase an ETF and then just walk away. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU .

• Acquisition and user‑run infrastructure: favor spot purchases and peer‑to‑peer venues (e.g., Bisq; Robosats over Lightning) where appropriate 45 Buy spot. Try p2p networks.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7speh/comment/ncb17so/ 19 P2P like Bisqhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7cdsg/comment/nc6d8pj/ 20 Or robosats on lightning network. Bitcoin meeting can be very helpful, P2P is awesome and a great way of meeting bitcoiners.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7cdsg/comment/nc6dkwu/ .

• Lightning node economics: channel operators can earn routing fees while retaining key control; however, fees are not “yield” in the custodial‑lending sense 26 If you run a Lightning node and manage channels, you earn fees for the transactions while retaining exclusive control over the private keyshttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n78dk2/comment/nc5myt3/ 25 yes and no. you do earn fees, but this is not yield.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n78dk2/comment/nc5rseh/ 24 If you’re earning yield on your Bitcoin, it’s not your Bitcoinhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n78dk2/comment/nc5ltbk/ .

• Institutional custody: expect corporate treasuries to lean on multi‑sig, institutional‑grade custody; in‑kind ETF redemption requests signal demand for delivery of underlying BTC, likely institution‑to‑institution for very large holders 3 And the question is, how are they going to custody their retained earnings? Because I'm of the opinion 10, 20 years from now it's bitcoin and we're not gonna be saving in dollars or anything like that. You're gonna be saving in bitcoin. How are these companies gonna be custodying it? Well, I think that you're gonna be using multi sig. Institutional grade custody. And a lot of people don't like hearing that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZkvWvtGx0s 2 You literally saw blackrock go out and partition or wrong word. They went out and tried to get in kind redemptions for their spot ETF in the and what that represents is exactly what I'm talking about, which is give me the underlying Bitcoin. I don't trust the custodian or I want to have the capacity to call it if I want to because I always want to be able to pick up the phone and like actually collect on the underlying. As opposed to paper receipts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZkvWvtGx0s 1 I think it's institution to institution is how that's going to happen. Unless you got massive bags. Bags, like if you had massive IBIT bags in excess of probably $10 million or $15 million, then they might let you somehow actually take custody of the underlying. And I even think even then, if you're like an individual and you were in that situation, I think it's still going to be a pain in the, in the butt to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZkvWvtGx0s .

• Hardware note: Ledger devices may reset on abnormal USB voltage; recovery is by restoring the seed directly on the device—never on a phone or computer 36 It's designed to reset if it detects some types of abnormal voltage on the USB port. Safe to restore. Make sure you only input the seed phrase on the device, not on your computer, phone etc.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7izzo/comment/nc7tfr1/ 27 Just re-enter your seed phrase into it.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7izzo/comment/nc7v0t1/ .

• Device options: Blockstream’s Jade Plus supports multisig and pairs with the Blockstream app; features like air‑gapped QR mode are available 64 Blockstream Jade Plus is the easiest, most secure way to protect your Bitcoin—perfect for beginners and pros alike. With a sleek design, simple setup, and step-by-step instructions, you'll be securing your Bitcoin in minutes.https://thebitcoinlayer.substack.com/p/fed-to-cut-rates-while-us-economy 63 Seamlessly pair with the Blockstream app on mobile or desktop for smooth onboarding . As your stack grows, Jade Plus grows with you—unlock features like the air-gapped JadeLink Storage Device or QR Mode for cable-free transactions using the built-in camera.https://thebitcoinlayer.substack.com/p/fed-to-cut-rates-while-us-economy 62 Want more security? Jade Plus supports multisig wallets with apps like Blockstream, Electrum, Sparrow, and Specter.https://thebitcoinlayer.substack.com/p/fed-to-cut-rates-while-us-economy .

Cultural Evolution

• Privacy urgency: panelists warn that advancing analytics and AI could make reconstructing long transactional histories trivial, increasing the need for stronger privacy approaches (e.g., ZK verification/rollups). Some users likewise perceive Bitcoin as highly trackable today 31 Eric, I think one underestimated like risk basically is that the privacy of bitcoin is so bad that if you've been a bit, a bitcoin user for a while, even if you're like taking your funds, depositing it into exchanges and then taking it out again, you will very soon be able to just ask like chatgpt5, chatgpt6 and ask like what is Shinobi's entire transactional history over the last 10 years? And it'll be able to stitch it together. Like it is a. It's an annoying process to do manually, but an AI could very easily like break and trivialize the privacy characteristics of Bitcoin such that I'm today like scared myself to even like touch any of my old wallets and like commingle any of my funds. So it's like for me that's like the biggest issue that I, I'm like scared to interact with with Bitcoin because I know that I'm leaving forever traces in a system that's very soon going to be much more transparent for state actors to want to link your transactional history together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 30 I don't think that's ever going to happen. I think it's better to do it through a snark and a roll up or something like shielded CSV or ZK coins. Makes more sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 28 Bitcoin seems very trackable from what I have seen, although I am new to it. Could be wrong. But one thing I do foresee is more companies, countries, and individuals stacking it as a form of collateral for loans, etc. I think the banks will one day accept it as such on a broader scale.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7q19p/comment/nca1je3/ .

• Censorship resistance vs. “intended use”: one side argues that paying fees to embed immutable messages exemplifies Bitcoin’s censorship resistance and could support miner revenue post‑subsidy; others emphasize Bitcoin as “a peer‑to‑peer electronic cash system.” The fee market and consensus rules arbitrate permissible uses 11 If someone wants to pay „0.001 BTC” to put a immortal message on the blockchain, they should be free to do it. That’s what Bitcoin is all about decentralization and censorship resistance.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n78nsx/comment/nc5q4tx/ 12 I mean, this could actually be a possible way for miners to stay profitable once there are no more block rewards.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n78nsx/comment/nc5q4tx/ 10 BTC = No one can stop you if you choose to use it that way!https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n78nsx/comment/nc5q4tx/ 9 BTC = A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash Systemhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n78nsx/comment/nc5tdxa/ .

• Node responsibility and diversity: commenters advocate greater node‑client diversity and running more validating nodes; operators focus on what they can control locally (policy choices, storage, and participation profile) 15 I've been pretty agnostic on the issue. Both sides are very good at sounding reasonable while making the other side sound unreasonable. I don't know that I'm technical enough to have an informed opinion, more node client decentralization is good, so whatever let the nerds fight it out. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7m6oe/comment/nc91i5m/ 14 that's partly why I structured this post as a self essay. All I can control is my node, and express my concerns and desires for that.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7m6oe/comment/nc92rb5/ 13 The orange strategy! and run as many nodes as possible! stay decentralised !https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7q5ni/comment/nc9ky1j/ .

• Key sovereignty norms: products where manufacturers generate or view user keys are broadly criticized; community advice favors DIY mnemonic stamping and avoiding pre‑provisioned keys 23 This has got to be the absolute most insane thing I've ever seen sold as a wallet. Absolutely the "founder" has doubles of every key.. why on earth would anyone trust this.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7oxlq/comment/nc9507i/ 22 Literally, someone else generated your private keys and who knows who saw it when engraving (which probably was done by sending the seed wirelessly to the engraving machine as well).https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7oxlq/comment/nc9507i/ 21 Please. Don't use this. As a weird collectibe.. not even as it might encourage others to use it...https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7oxlq/comment/nc9507i/ 18 I thought it looked somewhat tacky, but then you mentioned how they engraved the keys at the factory. Yikes! This is beyond awful. It's not even that it's not open source or a closed system, there's literally no source or system. If you like this stuff, you should've gotten the DIY version, where you stamp the mnemonic yourself. Then there's no downside (outside of the tackiness) and it's actually a great way to backup your wallet.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7oxlq/comment/nc9qn6l/ 17 The fact that they hid the public key for this post, but were totally ok with strangers at the factory seeing their private key.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7oxlq/comment/nc9r3i0/ . Also note “fake confirmation” scams (e.g., BitFlasher) that can mimic multiple confirmations and defraud users 16 ⚡ If you’ve heard about fake but “confirmed” BTC, that’s BitFlasher. It can push up to 9 confirms and still be fake. Scammers love it, but it’s just research.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n7oxlq/comment/nca8j4i/ .

1. Protocol Development

Utreexo BIPs Assigned Numbers 181–183

The Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) for Utreexo have been officially assigned numbers 181, 182, and 183 66 The Utreexo BIPs have been assigned numbers 181–183. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1923https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1962884941886443740 . This marks a formal step in the process of reviewing and potentially integrating Utreexo, a technology designed to reduce the state storage requirements for Bitcoin full nodes, thereby improving scalability and decentralization.

2. Lightning & Layer-2 Progress

Core Lightning Releases v25.09 “Hot Wallet Guardian” Core Lightning has released version 25.09, codenamed “Hot Wallet Guardian” 61 Core Lightning v25.09 “Hot Wallet Guardian” is here!https://x.com/Core_LN/status/1963016082954006670 . This release integrates several key features aimed at improving usability and node management:

• Bookkeeper Integration: The Bookkeeper plugin, which provides real-time visibility into payments, fees, and channel activity, is now fully integrated into the core software 60 Bookkeeper, first introduced to CLN as a plugin by @ niftynei in 2022, is now fully integrated! It offers real-time visibility into payments, fees, and channel activity, making node management more transparent. 🧵⬇️ https://x.com/Core_LN/status/1963016082954006670 .
• BIP353 Support: The xpay command has been upgraded to support BIP353 “at-user” payment addresses, enabling more human-readable payment identifiers like cln[at]blockstream.com 58 This release upgrades xpay with support for BIP353 “at-user” payment addresses (like cln[at][http://blockstream.com](http://blockstream.com)), making Lightning more human-friendly.https://x.com/Core_LN/status/1963016085646803082 .
• Splicing and Plugin Enhancements: The release includes smoother channel splicing functionality, and the Reckless tool now supports Python plugins 57 Splicing is smoother and Reckless now supports Python plugins.https://x.com/Core_LN/status/1963016085646803082 .

This release follows a period of active development, with 321 commits merged in 76 days since version 25.05, including contributions from four first-time contributors 59 Since v25.05, Core Lightning has merged 321 commits in 76 days. A warm welcome to 4 first-time contributors who are helping CLN continue evolving with more stability, usability and developer power. Onward. ⚡https://x.com/Core_LN/status/1963016087634944161 .

LN for Incentivizing High-Signal Reviews Alex Bosworth proposed using the Lightning Network to adjust incentives for online reviews 65 A problem with reviews is that there’s no incentive to post other than 5 star glowing positivity due to self-promotion or being pushed or 1 star irate negativity due to being angry and not planning on returning. A solution could be LN: adjust the incentives to reward high signal.https://x.com/alexbosworth/status/1962893286101876959 . The current model often leads to a bias of either five-star positivity or one-star negativity. By using LN, platforms could create mechanisms to reward reviewers who provide high-signal, valuable feedback 65 A problem with reviews is that there’s no incentive to post other than 5 star glowing positivity due to self-promotion or being pushed or 1 star irate negativity due to being angry and not planning on returning. A solution could be LN: adjust the incentives to reward high signal.https://x.com/alexbosworth/status/1962893286101876959 .

Spend & Replace Adoption Model A suggested adoption strategy involves using the Lightning Network for small, everyday purchases through services like Bitrefill, and then immediately repurchasing the spent satoshis with fiat currency 34 In the same time, to aid BTC as currency and accelerate adoption, a good initiative on an individual base is to use a small part of your BTC ( SATS) to practice Spend & Replace. Use apps like Bitrefill to buy coupons or voucers with Sats on Lightening Network to pay small expenses like grocery, and buy back what you have spent in Sats with Fiat. In this way you can actually have a better edge on volatility, will save you money, but you'll also directly contribute in creating a BTC circular economy and stimulate adoption, which will attract more and more financial services and merchants.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6n3mj/comment/nc1cw8u/ . This “Spend & Replace” model aims to build a circular economy, encouraging merchant adoption while allowing users to maintain their bitcoin position 34 In the same time, to aid BTC as currency and accelerate adoption, a good initiative on an individual base is to use a small part of your BTC ( SATS) to practice Spend & Replace. Use apps like Bitrefill to buy coupons or voucers with Sats on Lightening Network to pay small expenses like grocery, and buy back what you have spent in Sats with Fiat. In this way you can actually have a better edge on volatility, will save you money, but you'll also directly contribute in creating a BTC circular economy and stimulate adoption, which will attract more and more financial services and merchants.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6n3mj/comment/nc1cw8u/ .

3. Infrastructure Updates

Mining Technology and Operations

Energy Strategy as a Primary Profit Center Discussions highlighted that energy management now constitutes a critical component of a mining operation’s profitability, with energy comprising 70-80% of operational costs 47 So in Bitcoin mining usually 70, 80% of the cost is because of like operational cost is because of energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqBx3OEeD0 . For some machines, an effective energy strategy can account for as much as 70% of the total profit margin 46 Like our analysis shows, like for certain types of machines that number could be as high as 70% of the profit margin that comes from energy strategy rather than bitcoin mining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqBx3OEeD0 . Miners are increasingly participating in sophisticated energy markets:

• Load Responsiveness: While miners can curtail energy use rapidly (seconds or sub-seconds), the ramp-up time to full efficiency can take from 10 minutes to an hour, complicating simple real-time price response strategies 45 One problem of being responsive to those prices is in contrast to batteries, bitcoin mines or bitcoin devices, those are very slow in response. They usually go offline very quickly, let's say within a few seconds or even like under like sub seconds. Sometimes however, the ramp up time is very very slow. Like based on the model that could take you 10 minutes to sometimes one hour in order to get the machine back to the right hash and right efficiency. So when you are speaking of being responsive to real time prices, it's not as easy as that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqBx3OEeD0 44 As you mentioned, one of those important layers is being responsive to real time prices. One problem of being responsive to those prices is in contrast to batteries, bitcoin mines or bitcoin devices, those are very slow in response. They usually go offline very quickly, let's say within a few seconds or even like under like sub seconds. Sometimes however, the ramp up time is very very slow. Like based on the model that could take you 10 minutes to sometimes one hour in order to get the machine back to the right hash and right efficiency. So when you are speaking of being responsive to real time prices, it's not as easy as that. Like let's check if a statement price bigger than this shut down price came back like turn on. So you got to be ready to make decisions if the curtailment is worth it. So that's layer number one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqBx3OEeD0 .
• Grid Services: Miners engage in demand response programs and ancillary services, which require daily market participation and adherence to uptime compliance rules 41 So the third layer that people usually get on is called demand response. There are different types of demand response programs in different regions. Let's say there is emergency response service ers, there is responsive reserves. So people usually classify them as more basic demand response programs that actually pay really well for operations that want to remain less sophisticated. But there is a forced layer to it and that is more advanced demand response programs which are usually referred to as ancillary services. The difference of like demand response, the basic demand response and ancillary services is demand response. You usually opt in for a period of, let's say three months to a year. But in ancillary services you actually have to opt in every day for the next day. So that's more of a sophisticated process and you should be ready to participate in the market on a daily basis. What we do as a platform, we give people access to all the four and help them co optimize all these programs together in Order to maximize their profitability. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqBx3OEeD0 40 Usually we talk about like an additional layer on top, like the fifth layer, we call it compliance. So when you are participating in any of these programs, grid has certain expectations from you. You can't just be offline whenever you want. When you are being treated as a demand response resource, as someone who is out there to support the grid. When the grid needs that, you can just shut down your operation arbitrarily. Right? I mean you have to be online and wait for the signal off the grid. So in that case you need to comply with certain uptime requirements. So we also like support operations in order to comply with those uptime requirements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqBx3OEeD0 . Coincidental-peak avoidance programs (like ERCOT’s 4CP) are also a key revenue source 43 Some people call it 4cp. In some grids, some other places it is called 5cp 12cp 1cp. Depending on where you operate. It stands for coincidence coincidental peaks if I'm not mistaken. Right? Exactly. So it's coincidental peak. Technically that is a coincidence. So the the grid is asking you gamble on guessing when the peak happens and if you could cut your energy usage during those peak hours, I'm going to pay you back what you were paying as transmission cost. That's like what happens in Texas in aircraft, like in, for example PJM. There are two elements to it. There is a capacity charge and there is a transmission distribution cost that both happen based on coincidental peaks. So that's also something else that is important. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqBx3OEeD0 .

Hardware Design: Modularity and Predictive Maintenance A significant trend in hardware design is the shift towards modularity and repairability to maximize uptime and reduce total cost of ownership 4 And one of the things that struck me was like over this 12 year period of time in development, they're like, look, we went out to the field, we went out to the field and talked to miners on what they cared about. They're like, dude, we have to scrap an almost an entire miner because the, the, the hashboard is just kaput or the fan just breaks or whatever. And so it was like, well, what if it wasn't? What if you could just replace the fan easily? Just like take it out, pop or back in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys . Instead of focusing solely on headline efficiency (Joules/Terahash), operators are prioritizing durable miners with easily replaceable components, such as fans, to minimize downtime 6 And so it was like, well, what if it wasn't? What if you could just replace the fan easily? Just like take it out, pop or back in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys 5 Okay, how often are they, you know, DOA after three to six months. What's the cost of the downtime and the replacement cost? So what's your all in cost? Your, your investment in that? Or you get one that's basically super durable or more durable and it's more easily replaceable. So you know, instead of 90% uptime or your capex needing to buy, I don't know, I don't, I have no idea if this is the right strategy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys . The integration of AI for predictive maintenance, which can forecast component failures before they occur, is also being explored to allow for proactive servicing 3 I think one of the cool things as well is I, I've, I've not seen this, this minor or anything but I've heard that there's like an AI agent on board that will tell you that like parts are going to, are like going to be retired in say three months like the F or whatever it might be. Yeah. And that like integration of AI into these machines seems really cool especially in terms of downtime. Like you can have the replacements ready to go, rip something out, put it in and like there's really no downtime. I know you guys have been doing a lot of AI stuff in Austin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys 2 But that's one where it could be proactive to sense like, oh the f. There's an irregularity with the fan speed. And we've, you know, looked at our entire data set and noticed that there's a common, common issue with that type of the way the fan is acting that we think in the next 32 days that that fan could go down. You may want to go look at it. So it's a yellow right now and then it becomes a red 10 days. It's like, holy smokes, let's go replace that. But imagine like Tyler then sees that data. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys .

Large-Scale Infrastructure Large-scale mining operations continue to push boundaries. A BITMAIN and Hut 8 fireside chat detailed a 205 MW single-building facility that aims for high hash density and power efficiency, with chips running at ~200 kW per rack 56 The data center that we designed, if you think about Nvidia's Blackwell chips, it's about 140 kilowatts per rack of rack density. And so here, if you look at this data center, these chips are about 200 kilowatts per rack. So it's more dense in heat efficiency than the newest generation Blackwell chips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsyklDuBeMs 55 And so it's a beautiful campus, 205 megawatts in a single building. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsyklDuBeMs . Such facilities are also exploring synergies with AI data centers, envisioning a future where infrastructure can flexibly switch between running ASICs and GPUs 54 More of an urge to say these technologies can actually converge. And as we continue to develop this infrastructure with Bitmain, I do see a world where we'll have data centers that will be able to be malleable. Whether you put an ASIC chip from Bitmain or you put an Nvidia Blackwell gpu, you'll be able to run different types of compute in the same data center. And you can add a layer of redundancy, a layer of generator backup to provide more backup support for more expensive GPU compute that you need. And so I think in general, the big takeaway here is there's still a lot of innovation to be done within the mining sector. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsyklDuBeMs . In Texas, a judge is considering a permit for a third power plant to support a Bitcoin mine expansion in Hood County 35 Judge considers permit of third power plant as part of Bitcoin mine expansion in Hood Countyhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6n96j/ .

Grassroots and Home Mining

“Telehash” Community Event Successfully Solo-Mines a Block Reflecting a growing movement to decentralize mining, the Bitcoin Park community organized a “Telehash” event where home miners and larger operations donated hash rate to a collective pool 10 One day we're like, you know those old school telethons where they call in and donate money? We should do a telehash where noobs, home miners or big big pubcos could point us hash rate and donate us hash rate. How cool would that be? So like anything we do, we memed it and then we did it. And so there's a. We did it at bitcoin park the day before the Nashville Energy and Mining Summit this past year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys . The initiative gathered an average of 800 petahash per second 9 Oh on average it was like 800 PETA hash almost. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys and, against approximately 1-in-1,000 odds, successfully solo-mined a block at height 881,423 30 Can't multisig or any other type of protection solve that? Or at least drastically mitigate the risk?https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6n00r/comment/nc1mt5t/ 7 But at block height. 8, 8, 1, 4, 2, 3. We at Bitcoin park solo mined a bitcoin block on the bitcoin blockchain live on our livestream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys .

Open-Source Hardware Projects Projects like BitAxe and its successor, Ember, are driving the grassroots mining trend by open-sourcing hardware designs 11 So I think bitcoin mining is on a. The path to dismantle the proprietary bitcoin mining empire is happening in a number of different ways. So at the pleb or grassroots level, it's happening with a guy like Scott open sourcing the Bitax project so you can build your own home miner and just with whatever. 1, 2, 3 terahash. Just mine Bitcoin at home without your own electricity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys 1 I mean this ember one that we're working on is going to be badass. And there's so many. I mean just the, the. What's the number one? I've missed this so. Well, it's, it's one of the 2v6 foundation projects. It's like the next evolution in the, in the bit ax world. I mean there's a number of other bit axes as well, which is just freaking awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys . These initiatives aim to dismantle the “proprietary bitcoin mining empire” by making it feasible for individuals to mine at home, which also serves as an effective, hands-on tool for learning about the Bitcoin protocol 12 That's a whole long story on how we started it, but it was Basically us trolling and we memed it alive, which is basically we want to dismantle the proprietary bitcoin mining empire because there is one like with Bitmain and micro BT and all these centralized players from the pools and so on and just there's a massive opportunity, there's a massive community that, that wants to do this and we want to play a small role in supporting it. So Eco and I now Scott, the founder of the BitX project, he's involved on our podcast called Pod256. We were just joking. One day we're like, you know those old school telethons where they call in and donate money? We should do a telehash where noobs, home miners or big big pubcos could point us hash rate and donate us hash rate. How cool would that be? So like anything we do, we memed it and then we did it. And so there's a. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys 8 The best way to learn about bitcoin in my opinion, is just to mine Bitcoin, you're running a full node. You're learning about bitcoin, you're learning about deposit addresses, you're learning about mining pools, you're learning about everything. And you're just like, wait, how does this work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys .

Wallets and Custody

Trezor’s SLIP39 Implementation Detail Several users observed that Trezor’s 20-word SLIP39 single-share backups consistently generate “academic” as the third and fourth words 39 Dude i got both the 3 and 4 word same on 2 out of my 3 trezor 3 universal.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6rsnu/comment/nc28f76/ 38 I was kinda a little bit sceptical first when i wrote the same 3th and 4th word down like on my 1st Seedphrase.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6rsnu/comment/nc28f76/ . This is by design; the repeated word acts as a marker to identify the backup type and is not derived from the wallet’s entropy 25 "The third and fourth word in 20 word Single-share Backups are always: academic and academic. This is because they are there to tell the Trezor that it’s a single-share backup, and don’t reveal part of your private keys (although it’s still a best practice not to share that these are the words if that is the case for you :slight_smile: )."https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6rsnu/comment/nc2by3j/ 22 While the reasons for it are above my head, Trezor's 3rd and 4th words in their 20-word SLIP-39 seed phrase are set to "academic" for everyone by design.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6rsnu/comment/nc2gcth/ . Only 15 of the 20 words in this specific scheme are truly random 26 I just searched the trezor forum. Apparently only 15 of the 20 words are truly random.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6rsnu/comment/nc2by3j/ .

Hardware Wallet Security Models Community discussions continue to compare different hardware wallet security models. Coldcard is often cited as technically superior but more complex for average users, and its secure element is not open source 21 Trezor Safe 5 hands down. Secure, beautiful, easy to use which is super important so you don't make mistakes. Coldcard is the best technically, but it's slightly more technical and overkill for most people. Ledger just avoid due to their corporate culture and history.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6brf0/comment/nbz2sjj/ 67 Afaik coldcard’s secure elements are not open source, but trezor’s ishttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6brf0/comment/nbz7jet/ . In contrast, Trezor is noted for its user-friendliness and open-source secure element 21 Trezor Safe 5 hands down. Secure, beautiful, easy to use which is super important so you don't make mistakes. Coldcard is the best technically, but it's slightly more technical and overkill for most people. Ledger just avoid due to their corporate culture and history.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6brf0/comment/nbz2sjj/ 67 Afaik coldcard’s secure elements are not open source, but trezor’s ishttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6brf0/comment/nbz7jet/ . A common security recommendation is to use Bitcoin-only firmware when available to reduce the potential attack surface from code supporting other cryptocurrencies 28 I love my BB02 but you really should have opted for the Bitcoin Only edition . You got the shitcoin version = more lines of code, more attack vectors.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6ttha/comment/nc2qa2j/ .

4. Developer Discussions

Mempool Policy: Sub-1-Sat/vB Transaction Relay

A technical discussion focused on measuring the number of network peers that relay transactions with fees below 1 satoshi per virtual byte (sat/vB). A jq command was shared to query a node’s peers and identify those actively relaying low-fee transactions 64 bitcoin-cli getpeerinfo | jq ‘[.[] | select(.relaytxes == true and .minfeefilter < 0.00001 and (.bytessent_per_msg.tx > 0 or .bytesrecv_per_msg.tx > 0)) ] | length’https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1962893601421320425 63 @ ajtowns @ murchandamus @ theinstagibbs bitcoin-cli getpeerinfo | jq ‘[.[] | select(.relaytxes == true and .minfeefilter < 0.0001 and (.bytessent_per_msg.tx > 0 or .bytesrecv_per_msg.tx > 0)) ] | length’ https://x.com/caesrcd/status/1962864520155533388 .

bitcoin-cli getpeerinfo | jq ‘[.[] | select(.relaytxes == true and .minfeefilter < 0.00001 and (.bytessent_per_msg.tx > 0 or .bytesrecv_per_msg.tx > 0)) ] | length’ 64 bitcoin-cli getpeerinfo | jq ‘[.[] | select(.relaytxes == true and .minfeefilter < 0.00001 and (.bytessent_per_msg.tx > 0 or .bytesrecv_per_msg.tx > 0)) ] | length’https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1962893601421320425

However, participants noted several caveats that can complicate these measurements:

• Block-Relay-Only Nodes: Inbound block-relay-only connections do not send a feefilter message, causing their minfeefilter to appear as 0, which can skew results 68 I was wrong. I did not account for inbound `block-only-relay` nodes not sending a `minfeefilter` message and therefore showing up as 0. After removing nodes older than v0.13.0, and non-Bitcoin Core nodes, I think I have eight peers that accept sub-1-sat/vB. https://x.com/murchandamus/status/1962751958894485534 .
• Monitoring vs. Relaying: Peers with zero bytes sent or received for transaction messages may only be monitoring transaction propagation rather than actively participating in relay 62 @ murchandamus @ theinstagibbs You might want to check the received getdata/inv bytes from them too; if those values are 0 they’re never requesting/advertising tx data, just monitoring propagation.https://x.com/ajtowns/status/1962797244735967510 .

This conversation touches on the broader debate about mempool policy, including concerns about witness data size being increased to 100kB, which some fear could lead to blockchain “spam” with large data like JPEGs 24 bitcoin is monetary. i think we can all agree on that. is there a good reason that bitcoin core wants to remove filters and blow up the witness data to 100kB of data? allowing people to include stupid and explicit jpegs in their transactions? are you willing to relay child pr0n with your node?https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6frpp/comment/nc0fv6z/ . A counter-argument noted that large data can already be split across multiple smaller transactions to circumvent such filters 23 With or without Knots, people will still include spam in the blocks. If Knots will block one transaction with 100kb of spam, people will split the data into multiple transactionshttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6frpp/comment/nc0mhfv/ .

Post-Quantum Cryptography Threat

The potential threat of quantum computers to Bitcoin’s cryptography was raised, along with skepticism about the community’s ability to coordinate a timely fork if needed 33 Not trying to hate but people here need to embrace your first commandment and realize quantum is going to kill BTC. I’d be surprised if the community can agree on a fork to help honestly, they take so damn long.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6qrw9/comment/nc2kfjh/ . Technical counterpoints were offered, stating that current quantum computers have only managed to factor small numbers like 15 and that modern encryption remains secure 32 Quantum computers so powerful they have factored 15, but cannot factor 21 yet. I think modern encryption is safe for quite some time.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6qrw9/comment/nc39fl8/ . It was also clarified that Shor’s algorithm is designed for factoring, not for reversing cryptographic hash functions like the double SHA-256 used in Bitcoin 31 Not yet. The algorithm isn't there yet. Shor's is only for finding factors. There's no algorithm for reversing the irreversible SHA because SHA is hashing (not encryption). Double SHA makes the impossible even harder.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6qrw9/comment/nc3izfa/ .

5. Adoption Fundamentals

Institutional Infrastructure Requirements For broader institutional adoption, service providers must offer more than basic custody. Key requirements include:

• Robust Governance: Implementing complex authorization matrices and operational workflows to match clients’ internal governance processes 53 Right, so there is kind of a number of requirements that institutional investors actually do not compromise on. And then there's a number of services the institutional investors actually need. Obviously on the, I would say on the requirements, there are certain things that in today's world, companies like us need to have and need to provide. Right. So there's a certain degree obviously of security maybe. Usually retail investors are less aware of how important it is to run proper security operations for companies, for custodians or companies that hold assets in custody. But it's not only about that, it's about governance. So complex companies like ddc, they have complex authorization matrixes and different kind of user rights, et cetera, who decides to buy, who approves, who does the transfers, the operational metrics. So all these kind of processes and flows, they need to be implemented at the custodian or at the financial service providers level in a proper way to enable the governance processes of our clients. Then you have all the compliance, Right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z8xRHhFUUI .
• Compliance and Monitoring: Systems for monitoring transaction origins and destinations to meet regulatory and due diligence standards 52 Then you have all the compliance, Right? I mean, this conference is basically about the institutional adoption of bitcoin, right? So if we want institutional adoption, we also need to be aligned with the compliance requirements. Otherwise we cannot tap into the public markets, we cannot tap into the banking, rails, etc. So we need to make sure that transactions are properly monitored, that we, we can understand the risk and where the bitcoins are coming from, and they're where they're coming to. So these are kind of the basic requirements that companies like us need to have. And if we don't have it, it's almost impossible today to pass the due diligence of institutional investors working with us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z8xRHhFUUI .
• Yield and Lending Services: Institutions expect services such as yield generation (e.g., via staking Bitcoin on other networks like Babylon) and collateral management for lending and borrowing against their holdings 51 But you see what Q mentioned before. So institutional investors today, companies like ddc, they don't just buy bitcoin, for example, they need to get a yield out of the bitcoins that they have with a financial service provider. Where does the yield come from? Well, the yield comes from either borrowing or Volatility that is implied or it comes from other services, for example staking. You might be aware that right now you can basically stake bitcoin and put it at risk to earn yield on other networks. So Core Network or Babylon, they're for example, examples of this. And this is something that obviously companies that hold a lot of bitcoins also to finance their operations that would need these kind of services. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z8xRHhFUUI 50 And you mentioned leverage, right? So what if somebody wants to borrow against the bitcoins that are held with a financial institution? So we also need to provide services such as collateral management, three party agreements, third party agreements, etc. Escrow to make sure the lenders and borrowers can meet and lend against the bitcoins that they hold with the financial institutions. So it's really a complex set of services and requirements that happen behind the scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z8xRHhFUUI .

ETFs were noted as a critical access vehicle for investment managers who lack the mandate or infrastructure to hold Bitcoin directly 49 The fact that we have ETFs is a way for people to do it. Like to you maybe it doesn't make sense. Why would people buy ETFs and not Bitcoin? Well, because a lot of these investment managers out there don't have the mandate to buy bitcoin. They don't even have wallets that are set up right. Similarly for DAT site, why would they be good exposure for other people? Because there are investment managers out there that can only buy equities. So that actually works really well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z8xRHhFUUI .

Traditional Finance Integration Bow Valley Credit Union in Canada was highlighted as the first traditional financial institution in the country to directly integrate Bitcoin through a “Bitcoin gateway.” The service allows members to move between fiat and Bitcoin and withdraw to self-custody at any time 14 Attention all freedom loving Alberta bitcoiners. Tired of the big six banks freezing funds, blocking transactions, or slamming your account shut without warning or explanation? Just for dipping into Bitcoin, Remember the Freedom Convoy debanking nightmare? Federal government has invoked the Emergencies app. But don't let them control your money or erase your financial life. Join the pioneers over at Bow Valley Credit Union, a place run by freedom and sound money advocates. I bank there myself. They are the first and only traditional bank or credit union in Canada to directly integrate Bitcoin via their Bitcoin gateway. If you have to use dollars, why settle for a fiat only account when you could seamlessly move in and out of bitcoin. No hassle, no questions, no rehypothecation, no leverage. This isn't paper. Bitcoin withdraw to self custody at any time. Insured and auditable, it's perfect for adding Bitcoin to your corporate balance sheet. If you or your business is in Alberta, switch to your Bitcoin refuge@bowvalleycu.com, scan the QR code or click the link below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYOon48zxu8 .

Regulatory Hurdles for Nonprofits Adoption by non-profits faces significant regulatory challenges. Spike Cohen of “You Are The Power” noted that organizations cannot simply hold Bitcoin in a wallet without adhering to strict reporting requirements, which, if mishandled, can lead to confiscation 13 Can we help you set up a bitcoin wallet so you can receive sats at you are the Power. I would actually very much love that help, because it turns out when you run a nonprofit, it's not as. As easy as just getting a, you know, ledger wallet or whatever, because at some point you've got to report it or else you can end up losing it entirely, not just paying taxes on it by having it completely confiscated. That's part of the fun of being a nonprofit is you can't just. Just have a wallet. But we would absolutely love your help in doing that because we love to. We've been. We've been trying for years now to. To be able to do that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYOon48zxu8 .

6. Cultural Evolution

The Enduring Ethos of Self-Custody Across numerous discussions, the principle of “not your keys, not your coins” remains a central tenet of Bitcoin culture 27 Commandment 2 hits the hardest, not your keys, not your coinshttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6qrw9/comment/nc1yd0k/ 29 There are none because it violates one of the core tenants of holding bitcoin. Not your keys, not your coin. Add to that the absolute that if your coin is out of your control and it's gone, it's gone forever.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6n00r/comment/nc1l3ox/ . Community members consistently advocate for the use of hardware wallets for cold storage 48 That number is only going to grow. I would suggest researching hardware wallets. Exchanges are safe until they're not...https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6z9bc/comment/nc3rcqk/ 37 Dude!? wtf? congrats you're investing in the most exclusive asset in the word, but F-ing hodl. Basic orange bible rules: never sell your bitcoin. Keep them cold off line in self custody, keep stacking, and in the next few years (2 or 3) you will be smiling your ass off.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6ox4x/comment/nc2je2n/ and emphasize that the seed phrase represents ultimate ownership and access to funds 42 The Seed IS the Bitcoinhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6ls8v/comment/nc0ylf1/ 19 jk, actually all you need are those magic words (seed) in the correct order to restore your wallet.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6ls8v/comment/nc167gw/ .

Debate on Security Models: Passphrase vs. Multisig A debate on optimal security practices highlighted differing philosophies. While some advocate for combining a seed phrase with a passphrase as the most secure method for an individual 18 Seed Phrase + Passphrase = Most Securehttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6rsnu/comment/nc28ag9/ , others argue that it is “utterly pointless” without disciplined operational security for storing the two factors separately 17 The passphrase being used is direct proof that the user does not understand opsec.  The passphrase is utterly pointless.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6rsnu/comment/nc3h96r/ 15 So how do you store your passphraee differently than your mnemonic?https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6rsnu/comment/nc3tbcr/ . Proponents of multisignature (multisig) setups, such as 2-of-3 schemes, contend that they offer a fundamentally more robust security model 16 2-of-3 multisig = Mostest Securehttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6rsnu/comment/nc3hc16/ .

Privacy, Anonymity, and KYC The role of Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations remains a point of contention. Concerns were raised that KYC links on-chain activity to real-world identities, creating risks from data leaks and potential government overreach 36 Various reasons. F.ex, it opens you up to attack scenarios, be it from robbers (databases get leaked/stolen/sold) or government ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 ). It's difficult to erase KYC data from the internet, and since the blockchain is public & transparent, it's better to avoid KYC entirely (or to an extent that is practical), if you want to keep some privacy.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n6qrw9/comment/nc2s52d/ . It was clarified that the Bitcoin protocol itself is pseudo-anonymous and agnostic to KYC; these regulations are constructs imposed at the fiat on/off-ramps by exchanges 20 The Bitcoin protocol has nothing to do with KYC and exchanges. You can mine Bitcoin, buy Bitcoin P2P, or use P2P exchanges like bisq. Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous. Complete anonymity was never the primary purpose. The purpose of Bitcoin is three fold: cannot be debased (inflated), cannot be confiscated, and is transferable globally without an intermediary. The KYC issue is entirely a regulatory construct contained by the on/off ramps when exchanging for fiat.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n771t3/comment/nc5fe2c/ .

1. Protocol Development

Recent developments focus on enhancing the security, functionality, and long-term viability of Bitcoin’s core protocol.

Bitcoin Core Updates

Bitcoin Core version 28.0 and later will now encrypt blockchain data by default when a user performs a new Initial Block Download (IBD) 41 Hey @ Luffy_D_Dono , Bitcoin Core 28.0 and later will store the blockchain data is encrypted by default on a new IBD. Encryption is however not applied when you upgrade, only if you IBD from scratch. https://bitcoincore.org/en/releases/28.0/#blockstoragehttps://x.com/murchandamus/status/1962303652368125963 . This security enhancement is not applied automatically when upgrading an existing node; it requires syncing the blockchain from scratch 41 Hey @ Luffy_D_Dono , Bitcoin Core 28.0 and later will store the blockchain data is encrypted by default on a new IBD. Encryption is however not applied when you upgrade, only if you IBD from scratch. https://bitcoincore.org/en/releases/28.0/#blockstoragehttps://x.com/murchandamus/status/1962303652368125963 . The technical implication is increased data-at-rest security for new node operators, protecting blockchain data stored on disk.

BIP Implementation and Future Proposals

• BIP-353 Integration: A hackathon project successfully implemented BIP-353, which provides DNSSEC proof validation, into the SeedSigner hardware wallet 44 At this year’s @ hodlhodl Baltic Honeybadger, my hackathon project w/@alvunchained was to implement @ TheBlueMatt ’s BIP-353 DNSSEC proof validation in @ SeedSigner !https://x.com/KeithMukai/status/1961838821504352498 . Developer Matt Corallo commented that this indicates BIP-353 integration in hardware wallets is coming 43 This is cool work. BIP-353 integration in Hardware Wallets is coming!https://x.com/TheBlueMatt/status/1962109031461662814 , signaling progress in making payment information more robust and verifiable.
• Cross Input Signature Aggregation (CISA): Brink-sponsored Bitcoin Core developer Fabian Jahr presented on CISA, a potential future protocol improvement aimed at increasing transaction efficiency and privacy 31 Other notable presentations included a great workshop of how ASMap works by Julian Urraca, a brilliant nix-advocate and developer; a deep dive into how UTXOracle, a blockdata price oracle, works by inventor Simple Steve ; an overview on the state of privacy in Bitcoin from Max Hillebrand, a White Noise collaborator and long time cypherpunk; an in-depth report on current CoinJoin implementation privacy guarantees by Peter Todd ; an introduction to how Cashu can fit in your bitcoin payments workflows by CDK developer thesimplekid ; an intermediate level introduction to Miniscript by Ady Shimony , a Chaincode BOSS graduate; UX challenges with Payjoins from Yashraj of the Bitcoin Design Community; an announcement from spacebear of Payjoin Dev Kit about the new PDK Foundation along with an update on the PayJoin protocol’s development; a fictional(?) report on how disrupting Bitcoin adoption and development is going from Urban Hernandez of the Escape the Technocracy privacy consultancy; a look at Cross Input Signature Aggregation from Fabian Jahr , a Bitcoin Core developer at Brink; along with talks from Bitcredit, Fedimint, Ritrek, Vexl, and Djuri Baars of the BTClock project.https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/you-wouldnt-give-your-mom-a-utxo .
• Quantum Resistance: Looking toward long-term security threats, there is an expectation that Bitcoin will eventually incorporate quantum-safe mechanisms 40 At some point probably. Anytime soon, probably not. And bitcoin will almost definitely add quantum safe mechanisms before that happens.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n4ee2s/comment/nbogq6y/ . Quantum computing is viewed by some as “the only tangible threat” to Bitcoin’s long-term security as a potential world reserve currency 17 If bitcoin remains decentralised and secure then the value will be perfectly preserved. No need to diversify when money is incorruptible. Confidence in the security of the protocol is the only question mark. From my perspective quantum computing is the only tangible threat to bitcoin becoming world reserve currency.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5573y/comment/nbqal2g/ .

Scripting and Consensus

Discussions highlighted the nuances of protocol rules. A presentation at bitcoin++ provided an intermediate-level introduction to Miniscript, a language that simplifies writing complex Bitcoin scripts 31 Other notable presentations included a great workshop of how ASMap works by Julian Urraca, a brilliant nix-advocate and developer; a deep dive into how UTXOracle, a blockdata price oracle, works by inventor Simple Steve ; an overview on the state of privacy in Bitcoin from Max Hillebrand, a White Noise collaborator and long time cypherpunk; an in-depth report on current CoinJoin implementation privacy guarantees by Peter Todd ; an introduction to how Cashu can fit in your bitcoin payments workflows by CDK developer thesimplekid ; an intermediate level introduction to Miniscript by Ady Shimony , a Chaincode BOSS graduate; UX challenges with Payjoins from Yashraj of the Bitcoin Design Community; an announcement from spacebear of Payjoin Dev Kit about the new PDK Foundation along with an update on the PayJoin protocol’s development; a fictional(?) report on how disrupting Bitcoin adoption and development is going from Urban Hernandez of the Escape the Technocracy privacy consultancy; a look at Cross Input Signature Aggregation from Fabian Jahr , a Bitcoin Core developer at Brink; along with talks from Bitcredit, Fedimint, Ritrek, Vexl, and Djuri Baars of the BTClock project.https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/you-wouldnt-give-your-mom-a-utxo . Separately, Adam Back emphasized that what is consensus-enforceable in Bitcoin is a counter-intuitive and small subset of what is programmable. He noted that features lacking consensus enforceability or incentive compatibility are likely to fail over time 42 just something for people to be aware of, as i see people arguing from the intuition that it’s “anything we can program”, and if it’s not consensus enforceable, or even incentive compatible it’s probably going to fail over time.https://x.com/adam3us/status/1962089665961542125 , citing the minimum fee rate to prevent relay network DoS attacks as a clever, non-obvious consensus mechanism 45 what is consensus enforceable in bitcoin-like systems is counter-intuitive. it’s not “anything we can program” it’s a quirky tiny subset. the minimum fee rate and minimum increase to replace transactions is actually quite clever as it’s not obvious you could make relay anti-DoS.https://x.com/adam3us/status/1962089352739357036 .

2. Lightning & Layer-2 Progress

Significant research and development are underway to improve the privacy and functionality of second-layer protocols.

Lightning Network Privacy

Research presented at the bitcoin++ privacy summit highlighted key privacy challenges in the Lightning Network:

• Identified Vulnerabilities: Current implementations are susceptible to tracing funds via wire packet observation and timing attacks 36 But does it? @tnull_ , aka Elias Rohrer, a longtime contributor to the Lightning Development Kit and Spiral employee[1] was gracious enough to attend the privacy summit and talk about the state of privacy in lightning. His research has focused on figuring out the contours of what's visible in Lightning, from a privacy perspective. His talk at bitcoin++ highlighted the takeaways and challenges remaining. There's a number of issues with lightning privacy, particularly at wire packet observation levels that can make it easy to trace the movement of funds across the network, along with more data exposure level problems. The tldr is that lightning needs to update the spec to add padding to messages to make it harder to pattern match traffic over the wire to message exchanges, and more randomization of timings of sending payments, to frustrate timing attacks.https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/you-wouldnt-give-your-mom-a-utxo . On-path observers can deduce more about a payment’s origin and destination than is desirable 34 Lightning is semi-private from an outside observer, but on-path observers of payments can guess more about the origin and destination of any payment than we may be comfortable with. Is it more private than onchain? Certainly. Do we have some work left to do? Also yes.https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/you-wouldnt-give-your-mom-a-utxo .
• Proposed Solutions: Recommendations include updating the Lightning specification to add message padding, which would frustrate traffic pattern matching, and randomizing payment timings to mitigate timing attacks 36 But does it? @tnull_ , aka Elias Rohrer, a longtime contributor to the Lightning Development Kit and Spiral employee[1] was gracious enough to attend the privacy summit and talk about the state of privacy in lightning. His research has focused on figuring out the contours of what's visible in Lightning, from a privacy perspective. His talk at bitcoin++ highlighted the takeaways and challenges remaining. There's a number of issues with lightning privacy, particularly at wire packet observation levels that can make it easy to trace the movement of funds across the network, along with more data exposure level problems. The tldr is that lightning needs to update the spec to add padding to messages to make it harder to pattern match traffic over the wire to message exchanges, and more randomization of timings of sending payments, to frustrate timing attacks.https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/you-wouldnt-give-your-mom-a-utxo .
• Decentralization’s Limits: Research from Claudia Diaz of Nym Technologies showed that simply increasing decentralization does not greatly improve privacy, as network topology and liquidity layout can still narrow down the set of potential payment senders 35 Claudia Diaz of Nym Technologies, a leading mixnet implementation headed up by longtime cryptographer Harry Halpin, had an excellent talk on networks and privacy. In it, she shows that while centralization risk is certainly a problem for on-path deanonymization, making lightning more decentralized doesn't actually improve privacy that greatly, as the liquidity layout as well as network topology makes the set of nodes that might have sent a payment smaller than you'd think.https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/you-wouldnt-give-your-mom-a-utxo .

Protocol Enhancements and Implementations

• Hedgehog Protocol: A project named Hedgehog is being developed to improve the Lightning protocol for peer-to-peer payment channels, specifically to facilitate coinjoins 33 SuperTestnet also joined us in Riga. He's been raising eyebrows recently on x.com , baiting Monero maxis to admit that Lightning privacy is pretty damn good. His presentation at the conference focused on his current project to make coinjoins happen with Hedgehog, an improvement on the lightning protocol for making peer to peer payment channels.https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/you-wouldnt-give-your-mom-a-utxo .
• El Tor Project: This project aims to integrate Lightning payments (via BOLT12 offers) to incentivize the operation of more Tor nodes. A current technical hurdle is that the implementation required modifications to the Tor onion for proofs of payment, making the new nodes incompatible with the existing Tor network 29 Not just for coinjoins. eltordev's project, El Tor, is an open source project funded by the OpenSats foundation which aims to marry Lightning as a payments protocol with bootstrapping more Tor nodes. Lightning BOLT12 offers get added to node directory advertisements; a lightning payment to the offer on file grants you up to 10m of access to the circuits that run through that Tor route. Run a Tor node and a lightning node? You could get paid to provide bandwidth to the onion network. Except there's one problem with the current El Tor implementation. eltordev had to update the Tor onion to include proofs of payment. This change makes El Tor onions incompatible with the existing network, which means that you'd need to bootstrap another set of nodes running El Tor to be able to receive payment for routing private packets. Despite the bootstrapping challenges, I'm still bullish on the project. If every Start9 and Umbrel node ran an El Tor node, that'd be a considerable number of nodes compared to the existing Tor network. It'd be very exciting to see bitcoiners birth a new paid privacy network.https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/you-wouldnt-give-your-mom-a-utxo .

Other Layer-2 and Privacy Solutions

• CoinJoin: Coordinating large coinjoin rounds presents a trade-off: more participants increase the anonymity set but also raise the probability of a participant failing to sign, which causes the transaction to fail 32 Speaking of anonymity sets, we were lucky to have Kruw , the operator of the largest Wasabi coordinator, on prem to talk about challenges with effectively coordinating large numbers of transactors in coinjoin rounds. The more people in a round, the better your anonymity (in theory), but the more people in a round the more likely that a participant will fail to sign in time and prevent the transaction from being created successfully. Balancing the number of participants with privacy is a challenge.https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/you-wouldnt-give-your-mom-a-utxo . Peter Todd also presented a report on the privacy guarantees of current CoinJoin implementations 31 Other notable presentations included a great workshop of how ASMap works by Julian Urraca, a brilliant nix-advocate and developer; a deep dive into how UTXOracle, a blockdata price oracle, works by inventor Simple Steve ; an overview on the state of privacy in Bitcoin from Max Hillebrand, a White Noise collaborator and long time cypherpunk; an in-depth report on current CoinJoin implementation privacy guarantees by Peter Todd ; an introduction to how Cashu can fit in your bitcoin payments workflows by CDK developer thesimplekid ; an intermediate level introduction to Miniscript by Ady Shimony , a Chaincode BOSS graduate; UX challenges with Payjoins from Yashraj of the Bitcoin Design Community; an announcement from spacebear of Payjoin Dev Kit about the new PDK Foundation along with an update on the PayJoin protocol’s development; a fictional(?) report on how disrupting Bitcoin adoption and development is going from Urban Hernandez of the Escape the Technocracy privacy consultancy; a look at Cross Input Signature Aggregation from Fabian Jahr , a Bitcoin Core developer at Brink; along with talks from Bitcredit, Fedimint, Ritrek, Vexl, and Djuri Baars of the BTClock project.https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/you-wouldnt-give-your-mom-a-utxo .
• PayJoin: The Payjoin Dev Kit (PDK) Foundation was announced alongside an update on the PayJoin protocol’s development status, signaling continued formalization of the privacy-enhancing protocol 31 Other notable presentations included a great workshop of how ASMap works by Julian Urraca, a brilliant nix-advocate and developer; a deep dive into how UTXOracle, a blockdata price oracle, works by inventor Simple Steve ; an overview on the state of privacy in Bitcoin from Max Hillebrand, a White Noise collaborator and long time cypherpunk; an in-depth report on current CoinJoin implementation privacy guarantees by Peter Todd ; an introduction to how Cashu can fit in your bitcoin payments workflows by CDK developer thesimplekid ; an intermediate level introduction to Miniscript by Ady Shimony , a Chaincode BOSS graduate; UX challenges with Payjoins from Yashraj of the Bitcoin Design Community; an announcement from spacebear of Payjoin Dev Kit about the new PDK Foundation along with an update on the PayJoin protocol’s development; a fictional(?) report on how disrupting Bitcoin adoption and development is going from Urban Hernandez of the Escape the Technocracy privacy consultancy; a look at Cross Input Signature Aggregation from Fabian Jahr , a Bitcoin Core developer at Brink; along with talks from Bitcredit, Fedimint, Ritrek, Vexl, and Djuri Baars of the BTClock project.https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/you-wouldnt-give-your-mom-a-utxo .
• Cashu (e-cash): Development is underway to bring Key Verified Anonymous Credentials (KVACs) to Cashu. This would enable a shift from fixed-size denominations to a more flexible, UTXO-like model with variable-sized notes, using advanced cryptography like rangeproofs to preserve anonymity 30 E-cash is an off-chain protocol that trades off custody and peer-to-peer transacting with privacy. You wouldn't give your mom a UTXO but you would, maybe, give her a fat stack of ecash tokens. Ecash is a bearer asset, basically a small text document that contains a special signature that you can send to someone else. It's centralized though, which means you have to get help from a mint to forward the payment to the next party [2]. We had quite a few Cashu and Fedimint devs at the privacy-focused event. Both Calle , the inventor of Cashu, and Eric Sirion , the leading contributor to the Fedimint protocol both gave talks on Friday. Calle spoke about the importance of privacy for preserving freedom from tyranny. Calle’s been deeply involved in the Bitchat application development, a project that allows anyone to anonymously chat with others via Bluetooth[3]. We also had an amazing talk from Cashu developer lollerfirst, who covered his work to bring Key Verified Anonymous Credentials (KVACs for short) to cashu. This will allow the protocol to move away from fixed-size denominated notes to more of a UTXO model of variable sized notes. It uses more advanced cryptography techniques like rangeproofs to achieve anonymous notes with variable sizes.https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/you-wouldnt-give-your-mom-a-utxo .

3. Infrastructure Updates

Discussions covered best practices for running nodes, mining challenges, and hardware wallet functionality.

Node Operation

• Hardware Choices: A user weighed the options of running a full node on a 2TB external hard drive versus a pruned 500GB SSD 6 run full nodes on the 2tb external hd or run pruned 500gb on the ssd?https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5bfd8/comment/nbrhn5m/ . While syncing may be slower on an external drive compared to an SSD 4 external drives can take longer to sync though. ssd is betterhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5bfd8/comment/nbrfn52/ , the 2TB option for a full node was recommended as being “worth it” long-term 5 go for the 2TB. it will take longer, but will be worth it.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5bfd8/comment/nbri5ak/ .
• Wallet Connectivity: For connecting a hardware wallet to a personal node, Sparrow wallet was recommended over Trezor Suite to avoid using the company’s servers 3 Forget about Trezor suite, why use their servers? Get sparrow, thank me laterhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5bfd8/comment/nbshgn8/ . A user described their setup of running a node on one machine and connecting to it from another using Sparrow and a hardware wallet 2 sounds like a good setup, nice to have sparrow to connect to your own node alongside your hardware wallet.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5bfd8/comment/nbrt22n/ 1 Thanks alot man, apreciate it. Mind to share hows your setup too? my plan is use my work mac to run the full nodes with my lacie 2tb, and i use my dedicated trezor mac for interacting with the suite for better peace of mind, so i can then connect that mac (suite or sparrow) there to my nodes later right?https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5bfd8/comment/nbrrv5w/ .
• Network Mapping: A workshop at bitcoin++ explained the functionality of ASMap, a tool used for mapping the Bitcoin node network 31 Other notable presentations included a great workshop of how ASMap works by Julian Urraca, a brilliant nix-advocate and developer; a deep dive into how UTXOracle, a blockdata price oracle, works by inventor Simple Steve ; an overview on the state of privacy in Bitcoin from Max Hillebrand, a White Noise collaborator and long time cypherpunk; an in-depth report on current CoinJoin implementation privacy guarantees by Peter Todd ; an introduction to how Cashu can fit in your bitcoin payments workflows by CDK developer thesimplekid ; an intermediate level introduction to Miniscript by Ady Shimony , a Chaincode BOSS graduate; UX challenges with Payjoins from Yashraj of the Bitcoin Design Community; an announcement from spacebear of Payjoin Dev Kit about the new PDK Foundation along with an update on the PayJoin protocol’s development; a fictional(?) report on how disrupting Bitcoin adoption and development is going from Urban Hernandez of the Escape the Technocracy privacy consultancy; a look at Cross Input Signature Aggregation from Fabian Jahr , a Bitcoin Core developer at Brink; along with talks from Bitcredit, Fedimint, Ritrek, Vexl, and Djuri Baars of the BTClock project.https://insider.btcpp.dev/p/you-wouldnt-give-your-mom-a-utxo .

Mining

The primary technical challenge in Bitcoin mining is the network’s high difficulty level, not the price of electricity. This difficulty renders older hardware, such as a 10-year-old machine, completely outclassed and unprofitable 28 Main issue isn't the price of electricity, but the current difficulty of the mining. A 10 year-old machine is simply outclassed.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n4b62l/comment/nbmwa3o/ .

Hardware Wallets

• Jade: The first-generation Jade and the newer Jade+ models both offer a no-Bluetooth firmware option for enhanced security 27 For the 1st generation Jade there was no-bluetooth firmware, doing know if Jade+ has the samehttps://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n54yoa/comment/nbqmhlh/ 26 Both do, confirmed.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n54yoa/comment/nbqvm2y/ . One user reported successfully using the Jade fully air-gapped with various software wallets 16 I've used the Jade and the Jade Plus fully air-gapped and in temporary signer mode many times with many wallets and many configurations; single sig, multisig, collaborative multisig, passphrase. I've used them with Nunchuk, Sparrow, Blockstream and BlueWallet. Never had a problem with any of them. I've always used the no Bluetooth radio firmware. Hell I've even flashed the Jade with the mining firmware and mined with it :)https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n54yoa/comment/nbq8r0u/ . However, another user encountered an “Unsupported QR/PSBT format” error when trying to sign a transaction with Sparrow or Electrum 15 When I scan the QR with the Jade, it doesn't like it. It says "Unsupported QR/PSBT format"https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n54yoa/comment/nbqm30x/ . The suggested solution was to first import the public key (xpub) from the Jade into the software wallet before creating the transaction 14 Can't speak for electrum but with Sparrow the Jade is mother's milk. Have you imported the key housed on the Jade into Sparrow? You must first import the key before you can create a transaction and then sign it with the Jade.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n54yoa/comment/nbqr8aw/ 13 do you mean the xpub? which key do you mean?https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n54yoa/comment/nbqtp3w/ .
• Krux & SeedSigner: A developer pointed to the encrypted mnemonic format used by the Krux hardware wallet, which is also supported in a Seedsigner+Smartcard fork 10 If you want to re-invent the wheel, at least check out Krux and the encrypted mnemonic format that it uses... And try to do the same thing... (With is also supported in my Seedsigner+Smartcard fork)https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n4x0t8/comment/nbpiptg/ .

4. Developer Discussions

Community discussions have centered on development practices and the fundamental principles of protocol design.

Governance and Development Practices

A Reddit discussion highlighted controversy around developer lukejr and the Bitcoin Knots repository. Criticisms included what was described as “brutal” governance 25 I mean. Overall, I think the whole thing is unfortunate. The main dude, lukejr, is probably smart or whatever but he’s out there. His discourse on the topic make it hard to support him. The governance of the knots repo is, well, it’s brutal.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5ay3l/comment/nbrzek6/ and a practice of “pushing to master without a PR or a code review” 24 The way he had btc “stolen” and went to the fbi and may actually just have had poor opsec is the same guy pushing to master without a PR or a code review.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5ay3l/comment/nbrzek6/ . These actions have reportedly drawn concern from other long-time Bitcoin Core contributors 23 Meanwhile you have stalwart contributors to bitcoin core being like, dude wtf is this.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5ay3l/comment/nbrzek6/ . The conversation also referenced an incident where a claim of stolen BTC may have been the result of poor operational security 24 The way he had btc “stolen” and went to the fbi and may actually just have had poor opsec is the same guy pushing to master without a PR or a code review.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5ay3l/comment/nbrzek6/ .

Consensus Philosophy

Adam Back cautioned developers against the misconception that “anything we can program” can be implemented in Bitcoin 42 just something for people to be aware of, as i see people arguing from the intuition that it’s “anything we can program”, and if it’s not consensus enforceable, or even incentive compatible it’s probably going to fail over time.https://x.com/adam3us/status/1962089665961542125 . He stressed that only a “quirky tiny subset” of features are consensus-enforceable and that protocol additions must be incentive-compatible to avoid failure over time 45 what is consensus enforceable in bitcoin-like systems is counter-intuitive. it’s not “anything we can program” it’s a quirky tiny subset. the minimum fee rate and minimum increase to replace transactions is actually quite clever as it’s not obvious you could make relay anti-DoS.https://x.com/adam3us/status/1962089352739357036 . This serves as a reminder of the rigorous and conservative approach required for protocol-level changes.

5. Adoption Fundamentals

Metrics beyond price show the ongoing growth and fundamental utility of the network.

• Network Decentralization: The Bitcoin network is supported by tens of thousands, and possibly up to one hundred thousand, nodes distributed globally 39 It is a decentralized network of nodes. You can run a bitcoin node at home and verify your own coins, your own transactions. You can verify that it's a decentralized network of nodes. There's tens of thousands of them, maybe a hundred thousand around the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Rgq8UY3zo . The ability for users to run their own node to independently verify their transactions remains a cornerstone of the network’s decentralized architecture 38 You can run a bitcoin node at home and verify your own coins, your own transactions. You can verify that it's a decentralized network of nodes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Rgq8UY3zo . Running a personal node allows for verification capabilities that can be faster and more sovereign than relying on traditional audits 8 Can they prove the backing with audits faster than I can enter a command into my node?https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5939p/comment/nbr47z3/ .
• Fee Market Concerns: A user raised a long-term question about the sustainability of the fee market. For fees to eventually cover mining costs, the value of transactions will have to rise, given the block size limit. This could lead to a scenario where high fees make smaller UTXOs uneconomical to spend, effectively trapping funds in wallets that hold less than the average transaction fee 22 the thing that has always interested me about the transaction fee/mining question is that for fees to completely cover mining costs, the number of transactions, and the value of each transaction will have to go up. there's an upper limit on the number of transactions so it will likely have to come from the value. if the value goes sufficiently high, won't many many wallets be reduced to dust?https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n4pxvs/comment/nbnusz6/ 21 edit: what i mean by this is, average transaction fee is like $1000 USD equivalent of bitcoin but you only have $500, your bitcoin is effectively trapped. no?https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n4pxvs/comment/nbnusz6/ .
• Grassroots Adoption: In a town in Costa Rica, the practical use of Bitcoin is evident. Many local businesses accept it, a brewery hosts a Bitcoin ATM, and residents use the Lightning Network to settle small debts with each other 7 I live in a town in Costa Rica where many local businesses accept bitcoin. My wife and I have a small restaurant and offer a 10% discount for btc. There is a btc atm at the brewery. My local friends find it easier to settle out debts to one another by sending sats via lightning network. I feel like this is what we want for btc everywhere.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n4pxvs/comment/nbo3gwf/ .

6. Cultural Evolution

Ongoing dialogues within the community shape the philosophical direction and security practices of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Core Philosophy

• Conservative Development: A core tenet of Bitcoin’s culture is its prioritization of stability and conservatism in protocol development 37 There is stability and conservatism in Bitcoin, protocol development. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Rgq8UY3zo . This approach is seen as essential for maintaining the network’s security and reliability as a store of value.
• Bitcoin’s Uniqueness: A common viewpoint is that Bitcoin’s combination of solving the double-spend problem, ensuring value through proof-of-work and scarcity, and achieving uncensorable scale is an unrepeatable event 11 Bitcoin's magic formula of 1) solving the double-spend problem, 2) ensuring store of value through proof of work and scarcity, and 3) being uncensorable and immutable by reaching critical scale is an unrepeatable event.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n4l8ma/comment/nbmo7fr/ . This contrasts with alternative cryptocurrencies that often sacrifice security and decentralization for features like faster transactions or smart contracts 12 Smart contracts, faster transaction speeds - that's the only value prop the thousands of alts offer and all at a cost to security, immutability, and lack of decentralized governance.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n4l8ma/comment/nbmo7fr/ .

Security Practices and Beliefs

• Self-Custody: The principle of “Not your keys, not your coins” 9 Not your keys, not your coins bro. Bitcoin on an exchange is basically like a shittier version of an ETF. That's not bitcoin's fault. If you deal in gold on a dodgy exchange you'd have exactly the same problems.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n4ee2s/comment/nbqa5jp/ remains a central cultural value, emphasizing the importance of individual sovereignty and security through control of one’s own private keys.
• Security Setups: A user shared their experience of moving from a 2-of-3 multisig setup (using Ledger, Trezor, and Coldcard) back to a single-signature setup with a strong passphrase on a Coldcard 20 Not whale or OG at all, been hodling for 8 years. Used to have a 2of3 multisig setup (Ledger + Trezor + Coldcard) but have reverted back to single sig plus passphrase on Coldcard.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5ce92/comment/nbs0i2l/ . The reasoning was that for an individual managing their own funds, the complexity of multisig can introduce more vectors for error, making a robust single-sig setup feel more secure and less “messy” 19 Since I’m in control of all signing devices and not sharing the responsibility to different people, I feel that having multiple sets of seeds and devices just make it more messy and difficult to secure. A good seed backup plus a very strong passphrase has worked really well for me.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5ce92/comment/nbs0i2l/ .
• Trust in the Protocol: A discussion highlighted differing views on portfolio strategy. One user cited a lack of complete trust in the protocol as a reason for diversification 18 It's called diversification. Putting all eggs in one basket is very risky. I certainly don't trust the protocol enough to do that.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5573y/comment/nbq644b/ , while another argued that if Bitcoin remains secure and decentralized, it is incorruptible money that negates the need to diversify 17 If bitcoin remains decentralised and secure then the value will be perfectly preserved. No need to diversify when money is incorruptible. Confidence in the security of the protocol is the only question mark. From my perspective quantum computing is the only tangible threat to bitcoin becoming world reserve currency.https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1n5573y/comment/nbqal2g/ .