Bitcoin Explained - The Technical Side of Bitcoin

Reusing addresses and the Hertzbleed attack - Episode 60

Jul 1, 2022

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost discuss reusing Bitcoin addresses. More specifically, they explain why reusing Bitcoin addresses is a bad idea.

Reusing Bitcoin addresses is a bad idea for roughly three reasons. The first two of these are that it harms privacy and impedes...

Has Bitcoin Ever Hard Forked? - Episode 59

Jun 20, 2022

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost discuss a recent blog post by James Lopp titled, “Has Bitcoin Ever Hard Forked”?

Hard forks are generally defined as Bitcoin protocol upgrades that remove or loosen rules, making these types of upgrades backwards-incompatible. Aaron...

Silent Payments - Episode 58

Jun 10, 2022

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost welcome Ruben Somsen back on the show to talk about a recent proposal of his called “Silent Payments”.

Silent Payments resemble earlier ideas like Stealth Addresses and Reusable Payment Codes, in that they allow users to publish a...

URSFs (User Rejected Soft Forks) - Episode 57

May 6, 2022

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost discuss URSFs, which stands for either User Rejected Soft Forks or User Resisted Soft Forks, depending on who you ask. URSFs are a recently introduced tool in Bitcoin’s upgrade mechanism toolkit.

In the first part of the episode,...

Bitcoin Core 23.0 - Episode 56

Apr 25, 2022

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost discuss Bitcoin Core 23.0, the upcoming major release of Bitcoin's de facto reference implementation. The duo highlights some of the most notable changes in this new software client, and they offer a bit of extra context about the release...