There is a lot going on in the OP_RETURN debate, but I definitely agree with this: "What the OP_RETURN debate has demonstrated is that Bitcoin Core and the Bitcoin technical community have not done a good job communicating their value – not to mention the rationale behind their decisions – to the average bitcoin user."

OP_RETURN debate: influencers vs. devs - Blockspace Media

The Bitcoin Core developers have produced artifacts and content on these matters already, but those of us closely observing need to do a better job of disseminating that information to a broader set of Bitcoin ecosystem participants. "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." I need to do better.

Is there a way to stream video via RTMP to nostr?

Which way, quantum Bitcoiner?

After years of contributing to Bitcoin on nights and weekends, Sebastian Falbesoner has left his job to focus 100% of his time on Bitcoin open source development. "After years of contributing part-time, I'm thrilled to fully commit myself to improving the Bitcoin ecosystem. A big thanks to Brink for providing the ideal environment to make this dream a reality! 🫡 " - Sebastian Brink is proud to enable Sebastian's move to full time, but the credit goes to our supporters. Thank you Samara Asset Group, Lightspark, Stakwork, Ledger, Bitwise, VanEck, and Jack Dorsey whose multi-year pledges show engineers that open source development can be a sustainable career!

Brink just received our first donation from a Bitcoin Donor-Advised Fund. The donation was in BTC and made using a multisig onchain transaction. This donation was made through Unchained's Bitcoin DAF and will be held in our reserves to fund Bitcoin development into the future. 🚀

Brink is excited to announce that Eugene Siegel has joined us as an open source engineer working on fuzz testing and Bitcoin Core development! With a background as a security engineer working on Lightning and already disclosing multiple Bitcoin Core security vulnerabilities, we're excited for Eugene to help ensure the long-term security, resilience & decentralization of Bitcoin. Welcome Eugene!

Welcoming Eugene Siegel

Eugene Siegel has joined Brink as an engineer to work on fuzz testing and Bitcoin Core development.

Today we celebrate Hennadii Stepanov's 4 year anniversary as a Bitcoin Core engineer at Brink 🎉 From a simple fixup because of an old laptop, to one of the most prolific contributors to Bitcoin Core today...

Celebrating Hennadii’s First Brink Epoch

This month, we’re excited to celebrate a significant milestone—Hennadii Stepanov’s (hebasto) four-year anniversary as an open source Bitcoin ...

Whether that is the build system, operating system compatibility, the GUI, or language translations, hebasto’s efforts have been aimed at making Bitcoin secure, accessible, and user-friendly. Hebasto led a project to migrate the build system to a modern, CMake-based one, enhancing efficiency and paving the way for future development. The migration to CMake took nearly 300 pull requests, a dozen people, and two years of review and testing.

Bitcoin Optech

Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #319

This week’s newsletter summarizes a proposal for allowing Stratum v2 pool miners to receive compensation for the transaction fees contained in th...

Since his initial contribution, hebasto has 1800+ (!) commits to his name. But it isn't just his own work...in the last year alone hebasto also provided nearly 1,700 review comments.

GitHub

Contributors to bitcoin/bitcoin

Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree. Contribute to bitcoin/bitcoin development by creating an account on GitHub.

Brink and the Bitcoin community are lucky to have hebasto on our team. Thank you for your open source #Bitcoin contributions, Hennadii 🚀

Moisturized. Unbothered. In his lane. Flourishing.

Consensus Cleanup soft fork BIP draft dropped

GitHub

BIP 54: Consensus Cleanup by darosior · Pull Request #1800 · bitcoin/bips

This is a BIP draft for a Consensus Cleanup soft fork. This proposal builds upon Matt Corallo's 2019 proposal, which i set to revive at the end...

What is coming in Bitcoin Core 29.0? Demand Pool is deploying Cluster Mempool to production soon? What happens with no checkpoints in Bitcoin Core? View quoted note →

Podcast platforms used by Bitcoin Optech listeners. Pretty unusual stats, I'd think

Making the Presidio Bitcoin Pilgrimage this week. Come say hi if you're there on Thursday or for SF Bitdevs!

Simanta Gautam joined Brink engineers to discuss SNARKS, ZK Rollups & BitVM2 in a Bitcoin context: - Verifiable compute w/SNARKS - 2-way pegs, bridges, BitVM, trust minimization - Bitcoin's state machine - Sovereign ZK rollups - Use cases

Simanta Gautam from Alpen Labs on ZK Rollups

Simanta Gautam from Alpen Labs presents on SNARKS, ZK Rollups, and BitVM2.

Brink is happy to announce a $50,000 contribution to our open source Bitcoin development efforts from VanEck! Thank you to VanEck for supporting open source 🧡

Brink is grateful to receive a $50,000 contribution, in BTC, from Bitwise, to support our Bitcoin open source development work. Bitwise donated $150,000 across Brink, HRF, and OpenSats for Bitcoin open source developers. Thank you to @Hong Kim , Hunter Horsley, and the Bitwise team for supporting Bitcoin open source! 🧡

"Open Source Software and Corporate Influence"

Open Source Software and Corporate Influence — Andrew Lilley Brinker

Is it the longest weekly optech newsletter? View quoted note →

"For a sixth year running, regular Bitcoin Core contributors received a survey to surface priorities and ensure that people feel that they can contribute effectively. Below is a summary of the results in a format similar to previous years’ surveys." PRs Opened and Merged by Year Regarding Goals/Priorities for 2025 Areas of frustration/disappointment in 2024 Changes to improve the process/project Check out the the full post:

Bitcoin is for all of us

Bitcoin CoreDev reflections 2024-2025

For a sixth year running, regular Bitcoin Core contributors received a survey to surface priorities and ensure that people feel that they can contr...

Thanks @Jonas for putting this together

Brink renews our financial support for all of our 8 Bitcoin Core engineers through 2025! Thank you to Michael Ford (fanquake), Gloria Zhao, Hennadii Stepanov, Sebastian Falbesoner, Niklas Gögge, Stéphan Vuylsteke, Fabian Jahr, and Marco De Leon for your amazing work on Bitcoin and we are proud to support you. 🙏 If you're curious about the work these engineers are doing, we have a detailed annual report in the works. In the meantime check out last year's annual report

Brink’s 2023-2024 Annual Report

A report on our 2023 progress and 2024 outlook

Up for grabs! Bitcoin Optech would like to add a Block Reorg Calculator to our site. If you would like to implement the (corrected) calculations outlined in chapter 11 of the Bitcoin white paper, we are looking for external contributions! Inquire within:

GitHub

Feature suggestion: reorg calculator · Issue #2156 · bitcoinops/bitcoinops.github.io

Greg Maxwell used to host an online calculator based on Nakamoto's code from the original Bitcoin paper that let you plug in what percentage of has...