Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #235 Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Valentine Wallace to discuss Newsletter #235 (https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2023/01/25/).

News

• Ephemeral anchors compared to SIGHASH_GROUP (0:58)

• Request for proof that an async payment was accepted (12:04)

Selected Q&A from Bitcoin Stack Exchange

• Bitcoin Core signing keys were removed from repo. What is the new process? (27:53)

• Why doesn't signet use a unique bech32 prefix? (31:36)

• Arbitrary data storage in witness? (34:07)

• Why is the locktime set at transaction level while the sequence is set at input level? (38:35)

• BLS signatures vs Schnorr (42:30)

• Why exactly would adding further divisibility to bitcoin require a hard fork? (46:56)

Notable code and documentation changes

• Bitcoin Core #26325 (55:20)

• Libsecp256k1 #1192 (57:37)

• BIPs #1383 (1:00:22)