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• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #48

  This week’s newsletter describes the new proposed OP_CHECKOUTPUTSHASHVERIFY opcode, covers continued discussion of Taproot, and links to a video presentation about handling increasing Bitcoin transaction fees. Also included are our regular sections on bech32 sending support, top-voted Bitcoin StackExchange questions and answers, and notable changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #47

  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 sending support and notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #46

  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 support and notable changes in popular infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #45

  This week’s newsletter highlights some of the changes in the recently-released Bitcoin Core 0.18.0, briefly mentions two proposed BIPs, describes how bech32 addresses are forward compatible with expected protocol improvements, and summarizes notable changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #44

  This week’s newsletter sees another slow news week but does contain our regular sections on bech32 sending support, selected questions and answers from the Bitcoin StackExchange, and notable changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #43

  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 support and notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #42

  This week’s newsletter requests testing of the latest release candidates for Bitcoin Core and LND, describes how helping people accept payments to bech32 addresses can lower fees, and lists notable code changes in popular Bitcoin projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #41

  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 bech32 sending support and notable merges in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #40

  This week’s newsletter notes a spike in estimated transaction fees, describes LN trampoline payments, and publicizes Bitcoin Core’s intent to default its built-in wallet to bech32 receiving addresses in version 0.20 or earlier. Also included are regular sections about bech32 sending support and notable code changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #39

  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 included are links to resources about bech32 adoption, summaries of popular questions and answers from Bitcoin StackExchange, and a list of notable code changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #38

  This week’s newsletter gives an update on the planned removal of BIP61 reject messages from Bitcoin Core, links to further discussion about SIGHASH_NOINPUT_UNSAFE, analyzes some new features in the Esplora block chain explorer, provides information about an updated node ban list, and links to videos of talks at the recent MIT Bitcoin Club Expo. Also provided are a new weekly section about adoption of bech32 sending support and the normal list of notable changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #37

  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 an update on the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list, describes recent discussions from the list, and links to a chapter about payment batching in Optech’s work-in-progress scaling techniques book. Also included are descriptions of several notable commits in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #36

  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 problems in the Bitcoin consensus protocol. Also included are summaries of notable commits in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #35

  This week’s newsletter describes the availability of a libsecp256k1 fork implementing BIP-Schnorr compatible signatures, lists popular questions and answers for February from the Bitcoin StackExchange, and describes notable merges in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #34

  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-only mode with a hardware wallet, and describes the completion of the feature freeze for the next Bitcoin Core release. Also summarized are numerous code and documentation changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #33

  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 included are summaries of notable code changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #32

  This week’s newsletter includes an announcement of the 2019 Chaincode Residency program, summarizes a few talks from the Stanford Blockchain Conference, and provides the usual list of notable code changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #31

  This week’s newsletter summarizes a post about the privacy-improving payjoin proposal, links to top-voted questions and answers from Bitcoin StackExchange, and describes another busy week worth of notable commits in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #30

  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.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #29

  This week’s newsletter announces a security upgrade for C-Lightning, describes a paper and additional research into wallets that accidentally revealed their private keys, and lists some notable code changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #28

  This week’s newsletter announces a new maintenance release of Bitcoin Core, describes continued discussion about new signature hashes, and links to a post about possible economic barriers to LN payments crossing different currencies. Descriptions of notable code changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects are also provided.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #27: 2018 Year-in-Review Special

  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 tiny fraction of the work put into dozens of open source projects by hundreds of contributors. Without those low-level contributions, the high-concept ideas described in this newsletter would be just empty words, and so we extend our most sincere thanks to all of you who contributed to Bitcoin development this year.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #26

  This week’s newsletter describes the new libminisketch library for bandwidth efficient set reconciliation, links to an email about Schnorr/Taproot plans, and mentions an upcoming LN protocol specification meeting. Also included are a list of notable code changes in the past week from popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #25

  This week’s newsletter suggests helping test a Bitcoin Core maintenance release candidate, provides a link to a modern block explorer whose code has been open sourced, and briefly describes a suggestion for signature hashes to optionally cover transaction size. Notable code changes made in the past week to popular infrastructure projects are also described.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #24

  This week’s newsletter describes a proposal to tweak Bitcoin Core’s relay policy for related transactions to help simplify onchain fees for LN payments, mentions upcoming meetings about the LN protocol, and briefly describes a new LND release and work towards a Bitcoin Core maintenance release.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #23

  This week’s newsletter provides a reminder about potential feerate increases, summarizes suggested improvements to sighash flags to accompany BIP118 SIGHASH_NOINPUT_UNSAFE, and briefly describes a proposal to simplify fee bumping for LN commitment transactions. Also included are selected recent Q&A from Bitcoin StackExchange and descriptions of notable code changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #22

  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 specification, and lists several notable commits in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #21

  This week’s newsletter summarizes a few discussions on the Lightning-Dev mailing list, suggests an opportunity to develop a new tool some users would find helpful, and provides summaries and links to some of the talks at the recent Chaincode Lightning Applications residency. Several notable code changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects are also described.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #20

  This week’s newsletter contains a security notice about the C implementation of bech32 address decoding, an analysis of a temporary reduction in the number of segwit blocks, a link to an interesting discussion about future features for LN payments, and a few notable code changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #19

  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 available for miners using Antminer S9, and provides links to resources about both Square’s open sourced Subzero HSM-based multisig cold storage solution and the recent Lightning Network Residency and Hackday in New York City. Also included are selected recent Q&A from Bitcoin StackExchange and descriptions of notable code changes in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #18

  This week’s newsletter contains a warning about communicating with Bitcoin nodes using RPC over unencrypted connections, links to two new papers about creating fast multiparty ECDSA keys and signatures that could reduce transaction fees for multisig users, and lists some notable merges from popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #17

  This week’s newsletter briefly describes a proposal for splicing Lightning Network payment channels, links to videos and transcripts of talks from the Edge Dev++ training sessions, and summarizes some transcripts made during last week’s CoreDev.tech event.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #16: Scaling Bitcoin Special

  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, News, and Notable Code Changes sections. We hope to return to our usual format next week.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #15

  This week’s newsletter includes a notice of Bitcoin Core 0.17’s impending release, links to the backport releases of Bitcoin Core 0.15 and 0.14 to fix the CVE-2018-17144 duplicate inputs bug for those users unable to run more recent releases, a brief description of a chainsplit on testnet, and links to notable merges in Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #14

  This week’s newsletter includes action items and news related to last week’s security release of Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 and Bitcoin Core 0.17RC4, popular questions and answers from the Bitcoin StackExchange over the past month, and short descriptions of notable merges made to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #13

  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 to the C-Lightning 0.6.1 release, more information about BIP322, and some details about the Bustapay proposal; plus brief descriptions of notable merges in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #12

  This week’s newsletter references a discussion about BIP151 encryption for the peer-to-peer network protocol, provides an update on compatibility between Bitcoin and the W3C Web Payments draft specification, and briefly describes some notable merges in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #11

  This week’s newsletter includes a reminder to please help test the release candidate for Bitcoin Core’s next version, information about the development of Optech’s new public dashboard, summaries of two discussions on the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list, and notable commits from Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #10

  This week’s newsletter includes information about the first published release candidate for Bitcoin Core, news about BIP151 P2P protocol encryption and a potential future soft fork, top questions and answers from Bitcoin StackExchange, and some notable merges in popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #9

  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 the past week.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #8

  This week’s newsletter includes the usual dashboard and action items, news about the importance of allowing secure and anonymous responsible disclosure of bugs, a potential new payment protocol that can improve privacy on Bitcoin without any consensus rule changes, shaving one byte off the size of every transaction signature, a new restriction on the P2P network protocol, and lowering the minimum transaction relay fee—plus a few notable commits from the Bitcoin Core, LND, and C-Lightning projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #7

  This week’s newsletter includes the usual dashboard and action items, a link to discussion about generalized Bitcoin contracts over Lightning Network, a brief description of a recently-announced library for scalability-enhancing BLS signatures, and some notable commits from the Bitcoin Core, LND, and C-Lightning projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #6

  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 to Bitcoin’s script system, links to a few highly-voted questions and answers on the Bitcoin StackExchange, and some notable commits in the development branches of the Bitcoin Core, Lightning Network Daemon (LND), and C-lightning projects.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #5

  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 notable Bitcoin Core merges.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #4

  This week’s newsletter includes news and action items about a feature freeze for the next major version of Bitcoin Core, increasing transaction fees, a likely renaming of the proposed SIGHASH_NOINPUT flag, and several notable recent Bitcoin Core merges.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #3

  This week’s newsletter includes news and action items about minimum fees and the upcoming Bitcoin Core release, a special feature on a Schnorr signature proposal, and a write-up of the recent Building on Bitcoin conference in Lisbon.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #2

  Continued discussion over graftroot safety, BIP174 Partially-Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT) officially marked as proposed, and discussion of Dandelion transaction relay.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #1

  Announces a pending vulnerability disclosure for older Bitcoin Core releases, links to a PR about improved coin selection, and discusses dynamic wallet loading and unloading in Bitcoin Core multiwallet mode.

• Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #0

  A trial run of the Optech newsletter including news about the `OP_CODESEPARATOR` opcode, BetterHash mining protocol, and BIP157/158 compact block filters.

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