This week’s newsletter summarizes the disclosure of an issue affecting the safety of routed LN payments and announces a new presigned vault proposal. Also included are our regular sections with...

This week’s newsletter summarizes a proposed design for a coinswap implementation, describes new middleware for allowing lightweight wallets to request information directly from a user’s own node,...

This week’s newsletter describes the replacement cycling attack against HTLCs used in LN and other systems, examines the mitigations deployed for the attack, and summarizes several proposals for...

This special edition of the Optech Newsletter summarizes notable developments in Bitcoin during all of 2022.

This special edition of the Optech Newsletter summarizes notable developments in Bitcoin during all of 2019.

Announcement of a new index of topics frequently mentioned on the Optech website with an initial set of 40 topics and a plan to expand that over the next year to 100 topics.

This week’s newsletter is a special year-end edition summarizing notable developments in Bitcoin during all of 2018. Despite the extended length of this newsletter, we regret that it only covers a...

This special edition of the Optech Newsletter summarizes notable developments in Bitcoin during all of 2020.

Today we’re announcing our new project, Bitcoin Operations Technology Group (Optech). We want to help Bitcoin companies adopt the best scaling techniques and technologies available to make efficient...

A self-study course for learning about the schnorr/taproot softfork proposal.

This special edition of the Optech Newsletter summarizes notable developments in Bitcoin during all of 2021.

This week’s newsletter links to a blog post and paper about using eclipse attacks against Bitcoin software in order to steal from LN channels and describes the history and impact of a fee overpayment...

This week’s newsletter requests testing of the C-Lightning and Bitcoin Core release candidates, invites participation in structured review of the taproot proposal, highlights updates to two Bitcoin...

This week’s newsletter summarizes the CoinPool payment pool proposal and the WabiSabi coordinated coinjoin protocol. Also included are our regular sections with notable changes to services, client...

This week’s newsletter describes the development of a new constant-time algorithm for generating and verifying transaction signatures, mentions a proposal to stop processing unsolicited transactions,...

This special edition of the Optech Newsletter summarizes notable developments in Bitcoin during all of 2023.

This week’s newsletter announces the release of LND 0.8.2-beta, requests help testing the latest C-Lightning release candidate, discusses widespread support for basic multipath payments in LN,...

This week’s newsletter describes fidelity bonds for JoinMarket-style decentralized coinjoin, mentions a PR for BIP322 signmessage support (including the ability to sign for bech32 addresses), and...

This week’s newsletter includes a special section about the recent Taproot proposal, news about a small potential change to the BIP174 PSBT format, and our regular sections about bech32 sending...

This week’s newsletter provides an overview of the new MuSig2 paper, summarizes additional discussion about upfront fees in LN, and describes a proposal to simplify management of LN payments. Also...

This week’s newsletter links to a discussion about using enhanced QR codes for communicating large transactions, includes a field report from Suredbits about building a high-availability LN node, and...

This week’s newsletter asks for comments on the miniscript language, publishes our final bech32 sending support section, includes popular Q&A from the Bitcoin Stack Exchange, and describes several...

This week’s “wumbo-sized” newsletter provides a note about Bitcoin hash rate related to forks on other coins, summarizes several accepted goals for the Lightning Network protocol version 1.1 specif...

This week’s newsletter describes an analysis of the proposed OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (CTV) opcode’s effect on discreet log contracts and summarizes a discussion about alternative changes to tapscript...

This week’s newsletter includes our regular sections with summaries of popular questions and answers from the Bitcoin Stack Exchange, information about preparing for taproot activation, a list of new...

This week’s newsletter summarizes the final week of the organized taproot review, describes a discussion about coinjoin mixing without either equal value inputs or outputs, and mentions a proposal to...

This week’s newsletter describes two suggested improvements to LN static backups and links to a proposal for a new version of PSBTs. Also included are our regular sections with summaries of changes...

Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt are joined by Gregory Sanders, Antoine Poinsot, and Max Edwards to discuss Newsletter #277.

This week’s newsletter summarizes a discussion about the minimum change to Bitcoin’s Script language necessary to enable recursive covenants, examines a revised proposal to add an OP_TX opcode, and...

This week’s newsletter describes a proposal that taproot signatures make an additional commitment to spent scriptPubKeys and includes our regular sections with the summary of a Bitcoin Core PR Review...

This week’s newsletter describes a proposal to allow upgrading LN channel commitment transaction formats without opening new channels and includes a field report from River Financial about building...

This week’s newsletter summarizes several questions and answers from the Bitcoin Stack Exchange and describes notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

This week’s newsletter summarizes a thread about paying frequently-offline LN nodes, describes a set of proposals for lowering the cost of LN payment path probing in order to make certain attacks...

This week’s newsletter describes a proposal to make statechains deployable on Bitcoin without consensus changes, summarizes a discussion about a schnorr nonce generation function that helps protect...

This week’s newsletter describes a proposed LN feature to allow making spontaneous payments and provides our longest-ever list of notable code changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

This week’s newsletter includes a request to help test the next version of Bitcoin Core, short descriptions of projects Bitcoin Core contributors are working on, and a list of notable merges during...

This week’s newsletter suggests an update for C-Lightning users, describes a discussion about BIP69 deterministic input/output ordering on the mailing list, notes public overt ASICBoost support is...

This week’s newsletter relays a request for comments on a proposed change to the BIP341 taproot transaction digest and briefly summarizes discussion about a new and more concise protocol for atomic...

This week’s newsletter includes information about a new language to describe output scripts, an update on Bitcoin Core’s support for partially signed Bitcoin transactions, and news on several other...

This week’s newsletter announces a security disclosure affecting some older releases of Bitcoin Core, describes new developments related to taproot, mentions a potential privacy leak related to the...

This week’s newsletter summarizes an update to a proposed standard for LN and includes our regular sections about notable changes to services, client software, and popular Bitcoin infrastructure...

This week’s newsletter describes the new Minsc policy language and contains our regular sections with recently transcribed talks and conversations, releases and release candidates, and notable...

This week’s newsletter includes the usual dashboard and action items, a feature article by developer Anthony Towns about the consolidation of four million UTXOs at Xapo, news about possible upgrades...

This week’s newsletter summarizes posts to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list about payjoin adoption and making hardware wallets compatible with more advanced Bitcoin features. Also included are our...

This week’s newsletter announces the release of C-Lightning 0.8.1, requests help testing a Bitcoin Core maintenance release, summarizes a discussion about taproot versus implementing MAST and schnorr...

This week’s newsletter describes a proposed change to the way LN commitment transactions are constructed, summarizes discussion of a default signet, and links to a proposal for standardizing tempor...

This week’s newsletter announces the release of LND 0.6-beta and the merge of BIP158 support into Bitcoin Core’s development branch. Also included are the regular sections about bech32 sending...

This week’s newsletter links to a prototype for creating vaults using pre-signed transactions and includes our regular sections about notable changes to services, client software, and popular Bitcoin...

This week’s newsletter summarizes a discussion about the minimum allowed transaction size and includes our regular sections with popular questions and answers from the Bitcoin Stack Exchange,...

This week’s newsletter describes a new web-based tool for decoding and modifying PSBTs and links to a blog post and proof-of-concept implementation of an eltoo-based LN payment channel. Also included...

This week’s newsletter describes discussion about a desired replacement for some of the features of the BIP70 payment protocol and summarizes proposals for a standardized way to exchange fraud proofs...

This week’s newsletter announces the release of Eclair 0.3.3, requests help testing a Bitcoin Core maintenance release, links to a new tool for experimenting with taproot and tapscript, summarizes...

This week’s newsletter announces a meeting to discuss taproot activation mechanisms, includes a link to a Bitcoin Core usage survey, and includes our regular sections with top questions and answers...

This week’s newsletter summarizes ideas for relay enhancements after cluster mempool is deployed, describes results of research into the topologies and sizes of LN-style anchor outputs in 2023,...

This week’s newsletter announces the release of LND 0.9.0-beta, asks for help testing a release candidate for a Bitcoin Core maintenance release, describes a proposal to break the linkability between...

This week’s newsletter requests help testing release candidates for Bitcoin Core and LND, tracks continued discussion about the proposed noinput and anyprevout sighash flags, and describes several...

This week’s newsletter includes our regular sections with the best questions and answers of the past month from the Bitcoin Stack Exchange, our latest column about preparing for taproot, a list of...

This week’s newsletter describes the bip-anyprevout soft fork proposal, summarizes a few technical talks from the Magical Crypto Friends conference, and includes our regular sections on bech32...

This week’s newsletter summarizes a post about ways of integrating discreet log contracts with LN channels, links to a detailed summary of the recent LN developer conference, and describes ideas for...

This week’s newsletter describes a compiler bug that casts doubt on the safety of secure systems and explains a technique that can be used to more efficiently verify ECDSA signatures in Bitcoin. Also...

This week’s newsletter announces a change of networks for several IRC channels and celebrates Optech’s 150th newsletter. Also included are our regular sections with popular questions and answers from...

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Olaoluwa Osuntokun, Greg Sanders, and Pieter Wuille to discuss Newsletter #268.

This week’s newsletter seeks help testing a Bitcoin Core release candidate and summarizes some discussion about the BIP119 OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY proposal. Also included is our regular section about...

This week’s newsletter describes a technique for signature delegation under Bitcoin’s existing consensus rules, summarizes a discussion about taproot’s effect on Bitcoin’s resistance to quantum...

This week’s newsletter describes a new proposed Bitcoin P2P protocol message, a BIP for the bech32 modified address format, and an idea for preventing UTXO probing in proposed dual-funded LN channe...

This week’s newsletter describes a proposed update to BIP322 generic message signing and links to a specification for LN trampoline routing. Also included are our regular sections with announcements...

This week’s newsletter describes recent changes to services and client software, discusses why wallets should wait before generating taproot addresses, lists new software releases and release...

This week’s newsletter recommends checking for nodes vulnerable to the InvDoS attack, briefly describes that attack, summarizes another attack against LN channels, and links to the announcement of...

This week’s newsletter relays a security warning for LND users, summarizes discussion about LN upfront payments, describes a mailing list thread about updating bech32 addresses for taproot, and links...

This week’s newsletter describes work on simplified ECDSA adaptor signatures and includes our regular sections for Bitcoin Core PR Review Club discussion summaries, release announcements, and notable...

This week’s newsletter notes a vulnerability in Bitcoin Core versions that are already past end-of-life, asks for help testing release candidates of the next major version of Bitcoin Core, provides...

This week’s newsletter describes a vulnerability recently fixed in several LN implementations and summarizes a proposal providing multiple benefits for upgrading the LN protocol to take advantage of...

This week’s newsletter announces the 2020 Chaincode Residency program, describes two proposed routing improvements for LN, summarizes three interesting talks from the Stanford Blockchain Conference,...

This week’s newsletter summarizes a discussion about output tagging for BIP118 SIGHASH_NOINPUT_UNSAFE, announces merges that will make it possible to pair Bitcoin Core’s built-in wallet in watching...

This week’s newsletter summarizes a discussion about SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT and eltoo, includes a field report showing how 57,000 BTC could have been saved in transaction fees using segwit and batching,...

This week’s newsletter links to a proposal to encrypt P2P communication and describes Lightning Loop, a tool and service for withdrawing bitcoins from an LN channel to an onchain transaction. Also...

This week’s newsletter describes a proposal for Bitcoin-related MIME types and summarizes a paper about a design for a new decentralized mining pool. Also included are our regular sections with the...

This week’s newsletter requests help testing the next version of LND, summarizes a discussion about soft fork activation mechanisms, and describes a few notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastru...

This week’s newsletter describes a possible update to the BIP340 specification of schnorr signatures and a new proposed BIP that specifies how Bitcoin nodes should handle P2P protocol feature...

This week’s newsletter describes a proposal to extend PSBTs with fields for spending outputs constructed using a pay-to-contract protocol and includes our regular sections with summaries of top posts...

This week’s newsletter provides information about the activation of taproot and includes our regular sections with summaries of changes to services and client software, new releases and release...

This week’s newsletter links to a description of methods for preventing hardware wallets from leaking private information through transaction signatures, provides an update on the BIP322 generic...

This week’s newsletter summarizes two proposed BIPs related to wallet support for taproot and includes our regular sections describing selected questions and answers on the Bitcoin Stack Exchange,...

This week’s newsletter announces the newest release of LND, requests testing of release candidates for Bitcoin Core and C-Lightning, relays an update on the taproot proposal, describes a proposed...

This week’s newsletter consists entirely of summaries of several notable talks presented at the Scaling Bitcoin workshop last weekend, since there was very little to report in our usual Action Items,...

This week’s newsletter describes the proposed Erlay protocol that could significantly reduce the overhead of relaying unconfirmed transactions between nodes, summarizes an executive briefing by...

This week’s newsletter links to the summary of last week’s taproot activation meeting and announces another scheduled meeting for next week, plus it describes recent progress in discreet log contra...

This week’s newsletter announces a new minor version release of LND, notes downtime on the development mailing lists, describes some recent updates to Bitcoin services and clients, and summarizes...

This week’s newsletter links to the announcement of the C-Lightning 0.7 upgrade, notes a service outage for the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list, and describes a proposed soft fork to eliminate several old...

This week’s newsletter includes action items related to the security release of Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 and Bitcoin Core 0.17RC4, the newly-proposed BIP322, and Optech’s upcoming Paris workshop; a link...

This week’s newsletter summarizes a newly published fee ransom attack against LN users, links to continued discussion about the attack against LN atomicity, and shares a reminder about collision...

This week’s newsletter requests testing for release candidates of Bitcoin Core and LND, describes a discussion about UTXO snapshots for fast initial syncing of nodes, and provides regular coverage of...

This week’s newsletter announces the newest version of LND, briefly describes a tool for generating bitcoin ownership proofs, and links to an Optech study about the usability of Replace-by-Fee. Also...

This week’s newsletter notes a proposed BIP that would allow nodes to implement the Erlay transaction relay protocol, announces full disclosure of vulnerabilities that affected earlier versions of LN...

This week’s newsletter describes an update to the proposal for ephemeral anchors and provides a contributed field report about miniscript from a developer working at Wizardsardine. Also included are...

This week’s newsletter describes a proposal for a new managed joinpool protocol and summarizes an idea for relaying transactions using the Nostr protocol. Also included is another entry in our...