Bitcoin Optech: Newsletter #385: 2025 Year-in-Review Special Recap

Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Bastien Teinturier, Rearden Code, and Pieter Wuille to discuss Newsletter #385: 2025 Year-in-Review Special.

January

● Updated ChillDKG draft (43:08)

● Offchain DLCs (45:53)

● Compact block reconstructions (2:29:27)

February

● Erlay update (1:53:55)

● LN ephemeral anchor scripts (0:50)

● Probabilistic payments (54:45)

March

● Bitcoin Forking Guide (3:29:35)

● Private block template marketplace to prevent centralizing MEV (3:05:28)

● LN upfront and hold fees using burnable outputs (13:12)

April

● SwiftSync speedup for initial block download (2:09:35)

● DahLIAS interactive aggregate signatures (3:26:02)

Summary 2025: Quantum (58:07)

May

● Cluster mempool (1:22:11)

● Increasing or removing Bitcoin Core’s OP_RETURN policy limit (2:45:43)

June

● Calculating the selfish mining danger threshold (2:20:39)

● Fingerprinting nodes using addr messages (3:11:38)

● Garbled locks (3:19:01)

Summary 2025: Soft fork proposals (26:57)

July

● Chain code delegation (49:07)

August

● Utreexo draft BIPs (2:15:57)

● Lowering the minimum relay feerate (2:39:52)

● Peer block template sharing (2:56:01)

● Differential fuzzing of Bitcoin and LN implementations (3:16:08)

Summary 2025: Stratum v2 (2:04:49)

September

● Details about the design of Simplicity (3:23:01)

● Partitioning and eclipse attacks using BGP interception (3:13:47)

October

● Discussions about arbitrary data (3:01:15)

● Channel jamming mitigation simulation results and updates (11:05)

November

● Comparing performance of ECDSA signature validation in OpenSSL vs. libsecp256k1 (2:01:47)

● Modeling stale rates by propagation delay and mining centralization (2:22:32)

● BIP3 and the BIP process (3:31:37)

● Bitcoin Kernel C API introduced (3:35:35)

December

● Splicing (7:33)