Bitcoin, Explained — The Technical Side of Bitcoin

Aaron and Sjors discuss the COLDCARD hack: the bug itself, how it could have happened, and some reflections on having had Coinkite as a sponsor.

Note: If you’re using a COLDCARD and still haven’t moved your funds to a secure location, do this as soon as possible. (Also listen to the previous emergency broadcast.)

Further reading:

https://wizardsardine.com/blog/coldcard-rng-vulnerability/

https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/predictable-rng-fallback-and-32-bit-reseed-in-coldcard-firmware

Aaron’s Nostr: npub1art8cs66ffvnqns5zs5qa9fwlctmusj5lj38j94lv0ulw0j54wjqhpm0w5⁠

Sjors’ Nostr: npub1v25jqj332n630klwtqeqxgyrjl4alw4phmluhu2x6lcxzwy9m03suqexw3

If you’d like to sponsor the show, please email info at bitcoinexplainedpodcast.com.

https://bitcoinexplainedpodcast.com/

The COLDCARD hardware wallet has a critical vulnerability. If you are using the COLDCARD to store bitcoin, move them to a secure location as soon as you can.

More information:

https://blog.coinkite.com/coldcard-mk3-seed-generation-warning/

https://blog.coinkite.com/entropy-technical-backgrounder/

Aaron and Sjors discuss what’s new in Bitcoin Core 31.

This episode’s sponsor: CoinKite, maker of the COLDCARD.

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Aaron and Sjors discuss what’s new in Bitcoin Core 30.

This episode’s sponsor: CoinKite, maker of the COLDCARD.

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Aaron and Sjors discuss the proposal to remove the OP_RETURN limit from Bitcoin Core.

This episode’s sponsor: CoinKite, maker of the COLDCARD.

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Aaron and Sjors discuss what’s new in Bitcoin Core 29.

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This episode’s sponsor: CoinKite, maker of the COLDCARD.

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In Bitcoin, Explained 96, Aaron and Sjors discuss some recent innovations in mining, and in particular mining decentralization. Specifically, they discuss the Stratum V2 and DATUM mining protocols to decentralize transaction selection in mining pools, the open source hardware Bitaxe miner, and some recent proposals to make decentralized mining pools like P2Pool more viable.

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This episode’s sponsor: CoinKite, maker of the COLDCARD.

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In Bitcoin, Explained 95, Aaron and Sjors discuss the new Bitcoin Core 28.0 release. Specifically, they cover upgrades to Bitcoin’s testnet (testnet 4), new mempool policies, full RBF integration, the introduction of assume UTXO, improved wallet migration support and the implementation of block file XOR.

https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/

This episode’s sponsor: CoinKite, maker of the COLDCARD.

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In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors welcome Ruben Somsen and Josie to the show to discuss BIP 352, their now-finalized Bitcoin Improvement Proposal for Silent Payments.

As previously discussed in episode 58, Silent Payments use a special type of addresses that allow senders to generate public keys for transaction recipients, in such a way that these recipients can in turn generate the associated private keys. This benefits privacy, as Bitcoin users can freely share a static address, without this resulting in address reuse on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Aaron, Sjors, Ruben and Josie recap how this works. and discuss some of the implementation details for the BIP, including how light clients can utilize Silent Payments, how these payments are made compatible with CoinJoin, and an extra feature called “labels”.

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This episode’s sponsor: CoinKite, maker of the ColdCard.

Aaron’s Twitter: @AaronvanW

Sjors’ Twitter: @provoost

Ruben’s Twitter: @SomsenRuben

Josie’s Twitter: @josibake

If you’d like to sponsor the show, please email info at bitcoinexplainedpodcast.com.

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors discuss the Great Consensus Cleanup Revival soft fork(s). This proposal would fix some known bugs in the Bitcoin protocol, specifically the timewarp vulnerability, large block validation times, 64 byte transactions and BIP 30 verification.

Sjors also provides a quick update on the court case against Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev, and places this in the context of the recent arrests of Samourai Wallet developers Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill.

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This episode’s sponsor: CoinKite, maker of the ColdCard

Aaron’s Twitter: @AaronvanW

Aaron’s Nostr: npub1art8cs66ffvnqns5zs5qa9fwlctmusj5lj38j94lv0ulw0j54wjqhpm0w5

Sjors’ Twitter: @provoost

Sjors’ Nostr: npub1v25jqj332n630klwtqeqxgyrjl4alw4phmluhu2x6lcxzwy9m03suqexw3

If you’d like to sponsor the show, please email info at bitcoinexplainedpodcast.com.

https://bitcoinexplainedpodcast.com/