During my visit to the MIT Bitcoin Expo earlier this month, I had the opportunity to converse with Bitcoin Core developer Antoine Poinsot.
At present with Chaincode Labs, Antoine formerly worked at Wizardsardine, a Bitcoin security firm known for Revault, a vault utilizing pre-signed transactions, and Liana, a Bitcoin wallet built on miniscript. Antoine’s initial commit was integrated into Bitcoin Core on May 16th, 2019.
We talked about the Great Consensus Cleanup initiative that Antoine is proposing as a potential soft fork of the Bitcoin protocol, inspired by Matt Corallo’s original version of the proposal from 2019.
Bitcoin has experienced various bugs throughout the years, including some particularly critical incidents such as the inflation bug of 2010. There are still existing issues within the protocol—while not catastrophic, they are concerning nonetheless.
Antoine elaborates on these assorted protocol issues and the solutions he suggests to rectify them. Some can be considered merely self-inflicted injuries that are manageable if one is cognizant of them, while others are serious deficiencies that could pose a genuine danger to the Bitcoin network.
You can view the interview here: