Yes, there are multiple policy rules that are not configurable. You would have to change the code and recompile to accept infringing transactions to your mempool.

A simple example would be a transaction with two OP_RETURN outputs

I’d hope that they thoughtfully invest back into the ecosystem. When you hold enough bitcoins, you should recognize that contributing to development, education, and advocacy might have a greater payoff in wealth via what you already have than accumulating more instead.

I’m not intimately familiar with all they do, but I’ve seen some mention of education programs and advocacy for mining at least, so it seems to me that this is happening at least to some degree.

My understanding is that a xpub only keeps track of a single chain of keys. Therefore, you would need keep track of multiple xpubs to reconstruct the addresses of a multisig wallet.

You should look into output descriptors, they can keep track of complex output scripts and a single output descriptor can express a full multisig wallet.

I’m not great at prioritizing the most important task. I guess if that were different, my Bitcoin Core contributions would move a lot quicker, but on the other hand, I’d probably not have ~1900 posts on Bitcoin Stack Exchange and done over 8300 edits to posts there. I’d probably also not be posting on SN and Twitter as much, or co-host BitDevs. I’d probably be a more effective contributor if I were working more closely with a few people on one project rather than trying to do a dozen things at a time.

I like to think that some of the educational work I’ve done to help on-board people has led to more work being done on some projects overall than if I had worked on them directly.

Let me know if you have some good ideas how I could scale my impact, I’d be curious about an outsider perspective on that one.

I aim that 2024 will finally be the year that we get rid of the Knapsack coin selection algorithm in the Bitcoin Core codebase. I assume that there will be a few good parties around the halvening. I’m hoping to see Silent Payments, Cluster Mempool, and Package Relay (hopefully including Package RBF) get released. I don’t have any big surprises up my sleeve.

None of the above will be the most important things, though. I would guess that regulation of Bitcoin will be a focus in the next couple years which very well could have a huge impact on the overall direction of the project.

The cadence has been a bit low lately, but it’s still bouldering for me.

Thanks, I’m glad you enjoy them

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

It’s my observation that a softfork proposal only starts gaining momentum when there is a clear understanding of the benefits it provides and it builds a coalition that staunchly wants it to happen. Try to find passionate co-sponsors and hone the message explaining the benefits of the proposal.

Oof. Thanks for the feedback. I guess I could use some advice on how to proceed.

For Twitter Spaces, I had tried using a microphone with my phone, but learned that I could not output sound to a bluetooth headset at the same time. I was relegated to using the speaker of the phone to listen. Since I sounded so poor when I tried to use the headset as input and output, I have now been using just the phone directly. I got some remarks that it sounded better and nobody had complained since, so I assumed that it was at least okay now. Since I’m not using my headset these days anyway, I guess I could try to use the microphone again. I’ll do some testing before the recap tomorrow. I had tried to use my computer for Twitter Spaces, but unfortunately the web interface doesn’t allow you to raise your hand or show other speaker’s raised hand and that made the interaction with guests significantly worse.

If you are referring to my sound quality in the recent Nodesignal podcast, that’s mostly my fault. I was going to borrow my colleagues high-quality microphone, but asked to late, so I ended up just using my laptop’s microphone.

Do you happen to know of a microphone setup that is compatible with an Android Phone, but would also allow me to listen to the Spaces with headphones? I’d be happy to throw some money to improve the Optech Recap, since I actually do that every week, and I’m sure any microphone I’d get for my phone would also work with my computer.

Could you give me a hint? I don’t recall what you are referring to.

The only overlaps of Satoshi and mempool that come to mind right now are that the original purpose of the sequence field was not incentive compatible and that there used to be a portion of the block reserved for transactions with high coin-age priority. You could get a transaction into a block without paying a fee if the transaction had a high number of bitcoin-days-destroyed.

I recently rediscovered the concept of a Zettelkasten and have been using a note taking program that caters to it for the past two years. I also realized that Bitcoin Stack Exchange is basically a multi-user Zettelkasten on Bitcoin knowledge. Given my strong involvement, this is where most of my knowledge graph resides. I also frequently search the Bitcoin Optech topics to look up at least cliffnotes on topics, and have become more comfortable just grepping the Bitcoin Core codebase to verify factoids I remember.

20% to 80%? I’d say the majority of people have heard about Bitcoin at least a few times now, and people are using credit cards just fine without understanding how they work. We got a lot of rough edges to work out and Bitcoin has to solve some actual problem for people for them to start using it.

Oof, no idea. Another 25 years?

My pleasure

I co-host the Chaincode Podcast and the Bitcoin Optech Recap. Besides I have at least been on Blocktrainer and Nodesignal (both German) this year.

Hah, thanks

Edit: I don’t have any special insights into Udi’s motivation and have no idea how long I could. Honestly, I don’t want to spend time on pondering how I’d even go about it.

I had little programming experience before starting to study computer science. I started working as a part-time programmer during college and have been working in developer rolls since graduating. So at this point I have been getting paid for programming at least part-time for ~14 years, although only a few of those years that was my main job activity.

I used to really like Scala, but I haven’t used it in years. I mostly use C++ these days, but don’t particularly like it. Rust sounds very attractive, but I haven't gotten around to playing around with it much. There is a best tool for any task, but often the best tool is what people already know, so I find the "everything must be rewritten in Rust" stance a bit exasperating.

I sincerely doubt it. Even after the upcoming halving the subsidy will be 3.125 ₿ per block. To achieve this, we’d need blocks to remain full for the next four years and transactions to bid an average feerate of more than 312.5 ṩ/vB. My expectation would be that the inscription and rune hype will eventually abate and while those uses may continue to buy any "left-over" blockspace, I doubt that they will be pushing feerates as high as we’ve seen last week continuously.

Let's see, a (Brown) Bear is a Challenge Rating 1 Large Beast, and a Bull is a Challenge Rating 1/2 Large Beast. I haven’t rolled the dice, but I guess that the Bear would win.

I am not aware of anyone working on them explicitly, so it’s hard to give a timeline. I’m not the most plugged into Lightning Dev these days, though.

It’s been 80ish bytes in Bitcoin Core since 2014, which Luke at least acknowledged—even if it had been 40ish bytes in Knots then and has been ever since. Given that more than 99% of listening nodes are running Bitcoin Core, I don’t think it’s much of a debate that the current broadly accepted datacarriersize value would be Bitcoin Core’s default value. I don’t think it’s a good use of our time to engage with Luke’s unique perspective on this one.

I assume you mean an empty block.

The biggest challenge with that would be that the miners would still need to verify that none of the transactions from their staged template already got included. It’s easier to just shoot of an empty block template immediately as a new work instruction and then to start following up a fraction of a second later with some actual templates. Altogether, empty blocks have become pretty infrequent, so I’m not sure another approach would be worth the investment.

Depends

I would say that many of us earn less than we could make working in a normal industry or even at Bitcoin companies. Many of the grants come in around the amount that entry-level engineers make in NYC or Silicon Valley. On the other hand, we get to work on something we are passionate about with a huge portion of agency which is also worth a lot. I have heard of a few positions that make competitive amounts.

I’d probably spend more time on advocacy and informing regulators

I’m sorry to hear that. The Optech Newsletter aims to inform people working in our industry, so it naturally tends to be pretty technical. We do try to provide a lot of background information via e.g. the topic pages, and you can find more information on many different questions on Bitcoin Stack Exchange, but I could see how it might be a bit hard to get far enough into the topic to get much out of our newsletter. If you are just starting to dive into the technical aspects of Bitcoin, maybe a book like Grokking Bitcoin or Mastering Bitcoin 3rd Edition would be more accessible.

Yogurt and a cup of coffee

I have no idea

I’m still affording myself to abstain from the whole introspection debate—it’s not my wheelhouse and while the people that are really excited about it are still bashing in each other’s heads to agree what we are even looking for, I am not sure it’s worth having an opinion. I see the point of vaults and eltoo as applications of introspection, but most of the other things that have been floating around so far don’t strike me as ways to advance the technology and protocol to support bitcoin the currency.

If I'm allowed to prepare and equip myself one horse-sized duck. If it's spontaneous as I am, the 100 duck-sized horses.

Sorry, I do not