Bitcoin Core


Tech

‘Just Don’t Break’ Bitcoin: Devs Debate Tech Upgrades to Top Crypto

The bitcoiners gathered at OP_Next were decidedly in favor of progress – but not too much progress, and certainly not too fast.

Will Foxley opens OP_NEXT (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)

Consensus Magazine

Will Bitcoin’s New BIP Editors Streamline Development?

Five new editors were added to help speed up the process of approving and merging Bitcoin Improvement Proposals.

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Tech

Satoshi-Era Bitcoin Function 'OP_CAT' Dusted Off as Development Fervor Grows

Developers Ethan Heilman and Armin Sabouri view OP_CAT as a simple opcode that offers some of the general purpose functionality currently missing in Bitcoin

Armin Sabouri (left), one of the co-authors of the OP_CAT proposal; with Dan Gould, a Bitcoin developer; and co-author Ethan Heilman, in October at Chaincode Labs' Bitcoin Research Day, in New York. (Neha Narula)

Tech

Steward of Bitcoin Software Explains Why She Nixed an Acrimonious Code Debate

"All it was doing was generating noise," the Bitcoin Core maintainer Ava Chow says of Luke Dashjr's pull request, which would have severely curtailed the use of Ordinals inscriptions, sometimes known as "NFTs on Bitcoin."

Modified screenshot of Bitcoin Core maintainer Ava Chow's comment on GitHub, when she closed a controversial proposal from the developer Luke Dashjr. (GitHub, modified by CoinDesk)

Tech

Bitcoin Developer's Proposal to Stop 'Spam' NFTs Gets Shut Down

Luke Dashjr's technical proposal sounded innocuous enough: to make the popular Bitcoin Core software "effective with newer datacarrying styles." In reality, the effort represented a sophisticated but controversial plan to block the suddenly popular "inscriptions" known as "NFTs on Bitcoin."

Image of some of Luke Dashjr's proposed code changes, from pull request #28408. (GitHub, modified by CoinDesk)

Finance

VanEck to Donate 5% of BTC ETF Profits to Bitcoin Core Developers

The company last year made a similar pledge to Ethereum developers with respect to its ether futures ETF.

Coin jar (Josh Appel/Unsplash)

Tech

Bitcoin Core's 'v26.0' Upgrade Aims to Impede Eavesdropping, Tampering

The v26.0 upgrade contains experimental support for the v2 transport protocol as defined by Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 324 (BIP324).

Snippet of code pulled from Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 324, co-authored by Dhruv Mehta. (GitHub)

Tech

Disappearance of $900K Puts Focus on Vintage Bitcoin Project Libbitcoin

The issue, dubbed “Milk Sad,” was discovered in late July by information security firm Distrust.

Screenshot of code from Milk Sad vulnerability (milksad.info)

Tech

Bitcoin Core Developer Dhruvkaran Mehta Steps Away, Teases New Startup Idea

The developer known as @dhruv on Twitter and GitHub, formerly a Google software engineer and now a successful entrepreneur, is taking a break from working on Bitcoin for another shot at a startup.

Snippet of code pulled from Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 324, co-authored by Dhruv Mehta. (GitHub)

Tech

Reviewing Code Is Mind-Numbing: Q&A With Bitcoin Maintainer Andrew Chow

He stumbled upon Bitcoin in high school while looking for ways to pay for his favorite video games. He now reviews and improves Bitcoin’s code for a living. Sometimes it's boring and mind-numbing but he does it anyway. Somebody has to.

Andrew Chow (Advancing Bitcoin 2020)