bitcoin-dev by topic
Fifteen years of argument, sorted. A thread joins a topic by its subject line or when enough of its messages use the topic's words, so a long thread can sit under more than one. Each page is a timeline.
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The block size debate
From 2013 to 2017 the list argued over the 1 MB block size limit more than over anything else. Bigger blocks meant more transactions per block and higher costs to run a node; the limit held, SegWit raised the effective size, and the losing side forked off as Bitcoin Cash. The 2015 threads are the loudest the list has ever been.
138 threads, 1,917 messages, 2012 to 2025
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Segregated witness
SegWit moved signatures out of the part of a transaction that is hashed into its id. That fixed transaction malleability, which Lightning needed, and raised the block capacity as a side effect. Proposed on the list in December 2015, it activated in August 2017 after the fight recorded under soft fork activation.
186 threads, 1,827 messages, 2012 to 2026
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Taproot and Schnorr
Schnorr signatures (BIP 340) and Taproot (BIPs 341 and 342) were the first consensus change after SegWit. A Taproot output can be spent with one aggregated key or by revealing one branch of a script tree, and either way it looks the same. Discussed from 2018, activated in November 2021.
270 threads, 2,846 messages, 2017 to 2026
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Covenants: CTV, OP_CAT and friends
A covenant lets a coin restrict how it can be spent next. CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (BIP 119), ANYPREVOUT (BIP 118), OP_CAT and CHECKSIGFROMSTACK are the proposals that have been argued over since 2019, with vaults and better Lightning channels as the prizes. None has activated.
167 threads, 1,464 messages, 2015 to 2026
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Replace-by-fee
Whether a node should let an unconfirmed transaction be replaced by one paying a higher fee. Peter Todd's full RBF patches in 2013 and 2015 set off some of the angriest threads in the archive, because replacement makes unconfirmed payments unsafe for merchants. Opt-in RBF (BIP 125) shipped in 2015; Bitcoin Core made full RBF the default in 2023.
99 threads, 1,206 messages, 2012 to 2026
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Mempool policy and package relay
The rules a node applies to unconfirmed transactions: what it relays, what it keeps, and how a child can pay for its parent. Package relay, version 3 transactions, ephemeral anchors and cluster mempool are the recent work, most of it driven by what Lightning needs to get a transaction confirmed in a hurry.
85 threads, 814 messages, 2011 to 2025
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Fees and fee estimation
How much a transaction should pay, how a wallet should guess, and what happens to miners' income when the subsidy runs out. The fee market the list debated in theory in 2013 arrived in 2017, and the estimation threads are where today's wallet heuristics come from.
148 threads, 1,759 messages, 2012 to 2026
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Privacy: CoinJoin, stealth addresses, silent payments
Bitcoin's ledger is public, so privacy is a matter of what the chain does not reveal. CoinJoin (2013), stealth addresses and payment codes (2014), PayJoin, CoinSwap and silent payments (BIP 352) all started as list threads, as did the arguments against coin blacklists.
171 threads, 1,365 messages, 2013 to 2026
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Network privacy: Dandelion, Tor, encrypted transport
What a node leaks on the wire: which transactions it originated, who it talks to, and that it is a Bitcoin node at all. Dandelion, Tor and I2P support, and the encrypted transport that took two tries (BIP 151, then BIP 324) are the threads here.
36 threads, 281 messages, 2012 to 2026
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Quantum computing
A large enough quantum computer would break the signatures that protect every coin whose public key is visible on the chain. The list has discussed it since 2011; since 2024 the threads are about concrete post-quantum proposals, BIP 360 among them, and about what to do with coins that nobody can move.
71 threads, 710 messages, 2012 to 2026
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Time warp, timestamps and the consensus cleanup
Old mistakes in the block rules that have never been fixed: the time warp attack on the difficulty adjustment, 64-byte transactions, duplicate coinbases and the 2106 timestamp overflow. The Great Consensus Cleanup (BIP 54) gathers the fixes into one soft fork.
57 threads, 559 messages, 2011 to 2026
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The BIP process
How a proposal becomes a numbered BIP, who the editors are, and what the statuses mean. BIP 1 was announced on the list in 2011, BIP 2 replaced it in 2016 and BIP 3 in 2025; the threads in between are the arguments about numbers, licences and whether the editors decide anything.
91 threads, 913 messages, 2011 to 2026
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Soft fork activation
Not what to change but how to switch it on: miner signalling (BIP 9), flag days, the user-activated soft fork of 2017 (BIP 148), BIP 8 and Speedy Trial for Taproot. The question of who gets to decide has never been settled, which is why these threads keep coming back.
118 threads, 945 messages, 2013 to 2026
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Hard forks
A hard fork changes a rule in a way old nodes reject, so everyone has to upgrade or the chain splits. The list has debated how to do one safely, whether it ever should, and what to make of the forks that happened anyway: Bitcoin Cash in 2017 and Bitcoin SV in 2018.
177 threads, 2,524 messages, 2012 to 2026
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Bitcoin Core releases
Release candidates, release notes and the bugs found between them, from 0.3.23 in June 2011 to the numbered major versions of today. The release threads are the simplest way to see what changed when.
236 threads, 610 messages, 2011 to 2026
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Security disclosures and vulnerabilities
Bugs that could have been exploited, how they were disclosed, and the policy arguments about when to tell the public. The CVE threads here are the primary record of what went wrong and how quickly it was fixed.
104 threads, 940 messages, 2011 to 2026
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Chain splits and consensus bugs
The times the network disagreed with itself: the 2010 value overflow, the March 2013 split between Berkeley DB and LevelDB nodes, the 2015 SPV mining fork and the 2018 inflation bug. The threads written during each incident are here, with the post-mortems.
78 threads, 906 messages, 2011 to 2026
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Lightning and payment channels
Payment channels predate the Lightning paper of 2015, and the list is where the pieces were argued out: malleability fixes, CLTV and CSV, eltoo, channel factories, anchors. Most Lightning discussion moved to its own list in 2015, but the base-layer changes it needs still come through here.
132 threads, 1,364 messages, 2013 to 2026
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Timelocks
nLockTime was in the first release; CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY (BIP 65) and the relative locks of BIPs 68, 112 and 113 came out of these threads in 2014 and 2015. They are what make payment channels and vaults possible.
85 threads, 848 messages, 2013 to 2026
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HD wallets, seeds and derivation
BIP 32 (2012) made one seed stand for every key a wallet will ever use; BIP 39 turned the seed into words, and BIPs 43, 44, 49, 84 and 86 agreed where each kind of address lives. The threads include the arguments the standards left out, such as whether BIP 39 was a good idea.
125 threads, 1,132 messages, 2012 to 2026
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Descriptors, PSBT and Miniscript
The plumbing between wallets, hardware signers and coordinators: output descriptors say what a wallet watches, PSBT (BIP 174) carries a transaction between signers, and Miniscript makes scripts that software can reason about.
91 threads, 615 messages, 2013 to 2026
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Address formats
Base58 with a checksum, then P2SH addresses starting with 3 (BIP 16, 2012), then bech32 for SegWit (BIP 173, 2017) and bech32m for Taproot (BIP 350). Each format was argued over here, usually at length, usually about the checksum.
155 threads, 1,294 messages, 2011 to 2026
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Payment requests, URIs and invoices
How a payer learns where to send: bitcoin: URIs (BIP 21), the signed payment requests of BIP 70 and what replaced them, and signing a message with an address (BIP 322). The 2013 payment protocol threads are long because the list was designing commerce from scratch.
106 threads, 1,318 messages, 2011 to 2025
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Script and opcodes
Bitcoin's transaction language and what to add to it: OP_EVAL and the P2SH fight of 2011 and 2012, MAST, Simplicity, restoring disabled opcodes, and the sighash modes a signature can use.
192 threads, 1,754 messages, 2011 to 2026
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Multisig and threshold signatures
Spending that needs more than one key: OP_CHECKMULTISIG and the 2011 standards for it, the wallet conventions that followed, and the signature schemes (MuSig, FROST) that make several keys look like one.
149 threads, 1,269 messages, 2011 to 2026
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Data on the chain: OP_RETURN, inscriptions and spam
Whether the chain should carry anything but payments, and what to do when it does. The OP_RETURN debates of 2014, the coloured coin and timestamping projects, and the inscriptions and filter arguments of 2023 onward are all the same argument in different clothes.
107 threads, 1,258 messages, 2011 to 2026
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Mining and pools
Pools, the protocols between pool and miner (getblocktemplate, Stratum), ASIC design and ASICBoost, selfish mining, block withholding and the long worry about pool centralisation.
223 threads, 1,910 messages, 2011 to 2026
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Sidechains, drivechains and other layers
Chains and systems that borrow Bitcoin's security without changing its rules: federated sidechains like Liquid, the drivechain proposals (BIPs 300 and 301), statechains, and the rollup and BitVM ideas of the 2020s.
74 threads, 668 messages, 2014 to 2026
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Light clients and SPV
Wallets that do not keep the chain: SPV as the white paper described it, bloom filters (BIP 37) and why they failed, compact block filters (BIPs 157 and 158), fraud proofs and utreexo.
176 threads, 2,072 messages, 2011 to 2026
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The peer-to-peer protocol
How nodes find each other and what they say: the version handshake and service bits, address gossip, headers-first sync, compact blocks (BIP 152), Erlay, and the attacks on all of it.
142 threads, 1,204 messages, 2011 to 2026
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The UTXO set, pruning and initial sync
The set of spendable coins every full node keeps, how big it is allowed to get, and how a new node catches up: pruning, assumevalid, assumeutxo snapshots, UTXO commitments and utreexo.
143 threads, 1,489 messages, 2012 to 2026
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Governance, moderation and the list itself
Who decides, how the list is run, and the three times it moved house: SourceForge to the Linux Foundation in 2015, and to Google Groups in 2024. Moderation disputes and code-of-conduct threads are here too; they are part of the record.
77 threads, 694 messages, 2012 to 2026
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Supply, subsidy and halvings
The 21 million cap, the halving schedule, tail emission proposals, and what to call the units. Short threads, usually, because the answer on this list has always been the same.
57 threads, 790 messages, 2012 to 2026
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Signatures and cryptography
The mathematics under the signatures: secp256k1 and libsecp256k1, deterministic nonces, strict DER (BIP 66), signature aggregation, adaptor signatures, discreet log contracts and the zero-knowledge ideas that come and go.
155 threads, 1,109 messages, 2012 to 2026
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Node software and alternative implementations
Bitcoin Core is not the only node, and the list has never agreed on whether that is good: libbitcoin, btcd, bitcoinj, bcoin, Knots and the rest, and the recurring idea of a consensus library everyone could share.
114 threads, 792 messages, 2011 to 2026
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Testnet, signet and regtest
The networks for trying things: testnet and its resets, signet (BIP 325) with its signed blocks, testnet4 (BIP 94), and regtest for one machine.
89 threads, 761 messages, 2011 to 2026
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Wallet design and coin selection
Which coins a wallet spends, how it handles change and address gaps, and how it shows all of that to a person. Less visible than consensus work, and the threads show how much of it was invented on the list.
54 threads, 407 messages, 2011 to 2026