Bitcoin Optech

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Bitcoin Optech
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We provide weekly newsletters, workshops, case studies, and research for the #Bitcoin community.
Bitcoin Optech newsletter #385: 2025 Year-in-Review Special is here: - notes Bitcoin developments during each month of 2025 - feature: Vulnerability disclosures - feature: Quantum - feature: Soft fork proposals - feature: Stratum v2 - feature: Major releases of popular infrastructure projects - feature: Optech In 2025, Optech summarized more than a dozen vulnerability disclosures... With the increased attention on the potential for a future quantum computer to weaken or break the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm (ECDL) hardness assumption that Bitcoin relies on to prove the ownership of coins, several conversations and proposals were put forward throughout the year to discuss and mitigate the impact of such a development. This year saw a bevy of discussions around soft fork proposals, ranging from the tightly scoped and minimally impactful, to the broadly scoped and powerful… Stratum v2 is a mining protocol designed to replace the original Stratum protocol used between miners and mining pools. Throughout 2025, Bitcoin Core received several updates to better support Stratum v2 implementations.... Optech covered major releases of popular infrastructure projects throughout the year... In Optech’s eighth year, we published: - 50 newsletters - over 80,000 words, a 225pg book equivalent - over 60hrs of podcasts, with 500,000 words of transcripts w/75 guests - 150+ non-English translations A special thank you After contributing as the primary author for 376 consecutive Bitcoin Optech newsletters, Dave Harding stepped back from contributing regularly this year. We cannot thank Harding enough for anchoring the newsletter for eight years and all of the Bitcoin education, elucidation, and understanding he brought the community. We are eternally grateful and wish him all the best. Bitcoin Optech will host an audio recap discussion of this special newsletter on Riverside.fm Tuesday at 17:30 UTC. Join us to discuss or ask questions!
Bitcoin Optech newsletter #384 is here: - discloses vulnerabilities in LND - describes a project for running a virtual machine in an embedded secure element - summarizes changes to services/client software - summarizes popular Q&A from Stack Exchange - Optech Newsletter #384 Podcast Matt Morehouse posted to Delving Bitcoin about critical vulnerabilities fixed in LND 0.19.0... Salvatoshi posted to Delving Bitcoin about Vanadium, a virtualized secure enclave for hardware signing devices... Changes to services and client software: - Interactive transaction visualization tool - BlueWallet v7.2.2 released - Stratum v2 updates - Auradine announces Stratum v2 support - LDK Node 0.7.0 released - BIP-329 Python Library 1.0.0 release - Bitcoin Safe 1.6.0 released Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange: - Does a clearnet connection to my Lightning node require a TLS certificate? - Why do different implementations produce different DER signatures for the same private key and hash? - Why is the miniscript after value limited at 0x80000000? Bitcoin Optech will host an audio recap discussion of this newsletter on Tuesday at 17:30 UTC. Join us to discuss or ask questions!
Bitcoin Optech newsletter #383 is here: - describes a fixed vulnerability affecting the NBitcoin library - summarizes the LNHANCE soft fork proposal - relays a call to action to benchmark Bitcoin script execution under GSR's varops budget - highlights discussion of optimizations to SLH-DSA (SPHINCS) post-quantum signatures - Optech Newsletter #383 Podcast Bruno Garcia posted to Delving Bitcoin about a theoretical consensus failure in NBitcoin that could occur when using OP_NIP... Moonsettler proposes a soft fork for LNHANCE now that all four of its constituent opcodes have updated BIPs and reference implementations... Julian posted a call to action to benchmark Bitcoin script execution under the varops budget... Continuing the discussions around hardening Bitcoin against quantum computing, conduition presented his work on optimizing the SPHINCS signing algorithm... Bitcoin Optech will host an audio recap discussion of this newsletter on Riverside.fm Tuesday at 17:30 UTC. Join us to discuss or ask questions!