This post originally appeared as a guest post in Bitcoin Magazine . Bitcoin finally has a real payments advantage in the world of agentic payments. We all have to pitch in to capitalize on it. For all of bitcoin’s life, it has been fighting an uphill battle against fiat currencies that mostly do the job of being money. Obviously, fiat has plenty of issues, but when it comes to impacts immediately…
This post originally appeared as a part of Spiral’s newsletter . At this point, we can all agree that AI agents are more capable than humans at many basic tasks. We might not want to admit it, but like the fact that your phone knows more about you than your spouse, facts are facts. However, a huge bottleneck to agentic domination remains: agents still can’t reliably buy things. Whether it’s a…
This post originally appeared as a part of Spiral’s newsletter . When we started Spiral, we had no interest in being another place where a handful of bitcoin developers wrote open-source software they found interesting. Our mandate was to have a larger impact on bitcoin by making it more open and accessible to everyone in a way that neither individual open-source contributors nor unstructured…
In 2024 , I wrote about the delicate position of Bitcoin today. Between the lack of progress on mining centralization, the regulatory pressure and lack of support for noncustodial wallets, Bitcoin has been in a tough spot. Earlier this year , I wrote about how noncustodial wallets are critical to Bitcoin’s future and am genuinely excited for the user experience improvements we’re going to have in…
This post originally appeared as a part of Spiral’s newsletter . Tomorrow, May 8, I’ll be giving a talk at bitcoin++ about MEVPool and the best (but terrible) outcomes if MEVil proliferates on bitcoin. On a seemingly dissimilar but related note, last week, the bitcoin ecosystem was abuzz about another topic: Bitcoin Core standardness rules. I’ll let others dissect moderation policies and the…
This post originally appeared as a part of Spiral’s newsletter . If I’ve learned anything in my nearly 15 years of working on bitcoin, it’s that building trustless stuff on bitcoin is Hard (with a capital H). For the last 14 years, I’ve spent probably tens of thousands of hours trying to create the best user experiences for people who want to use bitcoin in a truly noncustodial way. Yet, every day…
In Lightning, whenever you send a payment, you must first pick a path over which to send it. If you pick that path well, the payment will complete immediately and for (hopefully) a low fee. If you pick poorly, a node in the path may not have enough funds available for your payment and will have to fail the payment back to you, at which point your node will need to pick a new path and try the…
These next few years are as existential for bitcoin as the Blocksize Wars . Back then it was about who got to decide what bitcoin was, now it’s about what bitcoin is. To most of us, bitcoin was always a tool for freedom - freedom to transact with who you wanted without trusting any third-party who could prevent you from doing so. But this is now a question. While Bitcoin’s price skyrocketed,…
As the systems built on bitcoin become increasingly expressive, the use-cases for bitcoin grow exponentially. While this is incredibly exciting, the one major concern both proponents and detractors of increased expressiveness can agree on is the risk of “MEV”. Sadly, there has been very little in the way of a clear definition of “MEV” in the context of bitcoin, and the standard definition of the…
This was originally posted on the bitcoin-dev mailing list targeting a technical audience bbut is preserved here as it is of more general interest. The requirements and goals of soft fork activation are of particular interest. There are a series of soft-fork designs which have recently been making good progress towards implementation and future adoption. However, for various reasons, activation…
This post was originally written for an opinion series marking ten years since the announcement of Bitcoin. It was not published at the time but appears here, without change, in the form it was written in late-2018. It was originally published in Dec, 2022 and has been backdated. Reflecting back on my almost-8-years of working on Bitcoin, I’m very proud of his far we’ve come in answering some of…
A few months ago I ran a hacker residency program with Chaincode Labs where we taught about Bitcoin philosophy, security, implementation, and technology. This is the first in a series of posts in which I’m going to write up some of what we discussed, hopefully making Bitcoin protocol development more accessible and helping frame discussions around proposed changes to the system. Before I can begin…
With Scaling Bitcoin over, and lots of interest in the conference, I figured I should post a summary of my views of how the conference went. While this year’s Scaling had a similar focus to the previous two, it seemed to have a different target audience. Instead of being focused making short- and medium-term scaling proposals accessible to a general audience for analysis, this this year’s…
I’m excited today to announce that, for a few months this coming fall, I will be taking up residency with Chaincode Labs in New York on sabbatical from Blockstream. Even more exciting - we’re looking for people to come join the fun! Chaincode Labs has been doing excellent protocol-level Bitcoin development for several years, and now has some of the top contributors to Bitcoin Core. In that time,…
When the Bitcoin Relay Network was announced, there were some (understandable) complaints about the centralization pressure that it might introduce. While most of the complaints were quickly withdrawn, it is certainly true that more could have been done to encourage others to set up their own relay networks, instead of relying on mine alone. Additionally, over the past year, as Bitcoin blocks have…
The scaling debate that has been gripping the Bitcoin community for the past half year has taken an interesting turn in 2016. Until recently, there have been two distinct camps - one proposing a significant change to the consensus-enforced block size limit to allow for more on-blockchain transactions and the other opposing such a change, suggesting instead that scaling be obtained by adding more…
Bitcoiners, from Bitcoin Core developers to long-time Bitcoin enthusiasts to recent /r/Bitcoin discoverers, love to talk about how Bitcoin’s decentralization is its ultimate feature. Rarely, however, do you see anyone explain why decentralization matters - surely it’s an interesting property from a computer science perspective, but why should consumers, businesses or investors care? This post is…