Location: Reddit # Covenants and BIP119 I was asked by an old colleague to respond to your post because I came up with the term covenant as applied Bitcoin many years ago back when I was still a Bitcoin developer. > does bip 119 completely mess the fungibility of bitcoin. If the idea of covenan...

Location: Reddit # Is PGP replaceable with Bitcoin public key infrastructure? This is true in the same sense that PGP can also be replaced with some fancy functions on a school kids graphing calculator. Yes you can construct some half-assed imitation of pgp using stuff from Bitcoin, but you pro...

> By this logic, a yubikey would also be a great targeting vector. They would be, and if US intelligence services have not compromised yubis or at least have a perfect targeted substitution solutions for them then they should all be fired for gross incompetence and mismanagement of their funding. ...

They're an enormous distraction and hazard to software development. It's hard enough to correctly and safely write software to support one system. Every minute spent creating and testing the software for some alternative is a minute taken away from supporting Bitcoin. I can say first hand that my e...

Location: Reddit # Can GitHub censor Bitcoin Core? The event isn't news to Bitcoin developers either, github has done this a number of times before-- even taking Mozilla offline as a result of an obviously spurious DMCA complaint. > Every developer that has the repository cloned has the full hi...

What is stopping the OP_CHECKMULTISIG extra pop bug from being fixed? Location: Bitcointalk # What is stopping the OP_CHECKMULTISIG extra pop bug from being fixed? I think it is probably wrong to describe it as a bug.  I think it was intended to indicate which signatures were present to fix the...

Taproot has been discussed for [2.5 years already]( and by the time it would activate it will certainly at this point be over three years. The bulk of the Taproot proposal, other than Taproot itself and specific encoding details, is significantly older too. (Enough that earlier versions of our prop...

Why can’t hash power be used for something useful? Location: Reddit # Why can’t hash power be used for something useful? There is a general game theory reason why this doesn't work out: Imagine that you are considering attempting to reorder the chain to undo a transaction. You could decide to ...

Location: Reddit # Is Liquid censorship resistant? Liquid isn't particularly censorship resistant. If someone tells you it is they're confused. Back when I worked at Blockstream there was thought in the design to mitigate some of the risks: make transactions difficult to identify, even the peg ...

I think questions like this are ultimately the result of a fundamental lack of understanding about what Bitcoin is doing. The problem Bitcoin is attempting to solve is getting everyone everywhere to agree on the same stable history of transactions. This is necessary because in order to prevent user...

I believe slower would potentially result in less testing and not likely result in more at this point. If we had an issue that newly introduced features were turning out to frequently have serious bugs that are discovered shortly after shipping there might be a case that it would improve the situat...

Location: Bitcointalk # Risks of multiple implementations They would create more risk. I don't think there is any reason to doubt that this is an objective fact which has been borne out by the history. First, failures in software are not independent. For example, when BU nodes were crashing due...

Location: Bitcointalk # bech32 design Bech32 is designed for human use and basically nothing else, the only consideration for QR codes is that all caps is also permitted. For all your talk of human considerations you give a strong signal of having seldom actually used bitcoin addresses as a hum...

slides: efficient block transfer: low latency block xfer: compact blocks FAQ some history more history Introduction I'll be talking about some recent advances in block propagation and why this stuff is important. I am going to talk about how the original bitcoin p2p protocol wo...

slides: git repo: preliminary v0.15 release notes (not finished yet): # Introduction Alright let's get started. There are a lot of new faces in the room. I feel like there's an increase in excitement around bitcoin right now. That's great. For those of you who are new to this space, I am go...

Introduction Thank you. So as mentioned, I am going to be talking about <a href=" transactions</a> today. And I look at confidential transactions as a building block fundamental piece of technology, it's not like altcoin or something like that. It's not a turnkey system, it's some fundamental tech...

# Mining, block size, etc. So uh I am really excited to announce or introduce our next speaker, Greg Maxwell. Greg, well, there are people who talk and there's people who do, and Greg is definitely a doer. He is definitely one of the most accomplished if not most helpful, one of the most active peo...

Bringing New Elements to Bitcoin with Sidechains SF Bitcoin Devs Meetup Gregory Maxwell DE47 BC9E 6D2D A6B0 2DC6 10B1 AC85 9362 B041 3BFA slides: Hello, I am Greg Maxwell, one of the developers of the Bitcoin system and its reference software. Since 2011, I have worked on the system facing ma...

* slides: A deep dive with Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell The blueberry muffins are a lie. But instead I got some other things to present about. My name is Greg Maxwell. I am one of the committers to Bitcoin Core. I am one of the five people with commit access. I have been working on Bitcoin...

Today OpenSSL [de-embargoed CVE-2014-3570]( "Bignum squaring may produce incorrect results". That particular security advisory is not a concern for Bitcoin users, but it allows me to explain some of the context behind a slightly cryptic statement I made in the [release notes]( for the upcoming Bitco...

I contributed to the discovery and analysis of CVE-2014-3570 "Bignum squaring may produce incorrect results". In this case, the issue was that one of the carry propagation conditions was missed. The bug was discovered as part of the development of libsecp256k1, a high performance (and hopefully high...