Bitcoin Optech newsletter #385: 2025 Year-in-Review Special is here:

In 2025, Optech summarized more than a dozen vulnerability disclosures... https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2025/12/19/#vulns

With the increased attention on the potential for a future quantum computer to weaken or break the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm (ECDL) hardness assumption that Bitcoin relies on to prove the ownership of coins, several conversations and proposals were put forward throughout the year to discuss and mitigate the impact of such a development. https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2025/12/19/#quantum

This year saw a bevy of discussions around soft fork proposals, ranging from the tightly scoped and minimally impactful, to the broadly scoped and powerful… https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2025/12/19/#softforks

Stratum v2 is a mining protocol designed to replace the original Stratum protocol used between miners and mining pools. Throughout 2025, Bitcoin Core received several updates to better support Stratum v2 implementations.... https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2025/12/19/#stratumv2

Optech covered major releases of popular infrastructure projects throughout the year... https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2025/12/19/#releases

In Optech’s eighth year, we published:

A special thank you After contributing as the primary author for 376 consecutive Bitcoin Optech newsletters, Dave Harding stepped back from contributing regularly this year. We cannot thank Harding enough for anchoring the newsletter for eight years and all of the Bitcoin education, elucidation, and understanding he brought the community. We are eternally grateful and wish him all the best.

Bitcoin Optech will host an audio recap discussion of this special newsletter on Riverside.fm Tuesday at 17:30 UTC. Join us to discuss or ask questions! https://riverside.fm/studio/bitcoin-optech