Bitcoin Governance

The Loudest Fight of the Year Ended at Two Percent

BIP-110 split timelines for months over a cap on arbitrary data in transactions. When the signaling window actually opened, almost nobody signaled.

Bitcoin's ugliest argument of the year settled itself quietly this week, and the number did the talking. Contra, in an essay published to Fanfares: The loudest Bitcoin fight of the year ended with about 2% of miners signaling for it. BIP-110 wanted to cap arbitrary data in transactions for a one year trial. Adam Back called it a downgrade. Michael Saylor published a hundred and ten reasons against it. The signaling window opened in August against a 55% early lock in threshold, and support sat at roughly 2%. Measured by volume it was a war. Measured by consensus it was a rounding error.

The gap is the real story now. Bitcoin has not changed a consensus rule since Taproot in November 2021, the longest quiet stretch in its history, and some of that is conservatism working exactly as designed. Some of it is that we have gotten worse at finishing an argument. Contra's own summary of the piece put the underlying advice more bluntly than the essay itself does: pick a side on the money, and refuse the bait about the tribe. The rest of the piece sits behind a small paywall on Fanfares.

Cryptography

A Quantum-Resistant Transaction Landed on Mainnet, No Vote Required

Ungovernable flagged the test case: Two Starkware researchers broadcast a quantum resistant Bitcoin transaction on mainnet, in block 964199, using hash based one time signatures built from script opcodes that already exist. No consensus change. No soft fork. Nobody had to ask Bitcoin Core for anything. The cost was real but survivable: It is about five times the size of a normal transaction, so at fifty sats a byte it stings. At one sat a byte it is nothing. And if the alternative is being quantum vulnerable, that is a price worth paying.

The same week, the Human Rights Foundation's Financial Freedom Report noted a formal proposal now moving through the slower process: a first draft of a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal called SHRINCS, an experimental signature scheme aimed at the same threat, framed by the report as groundwork for bitcoin's continued use as freedom money. One camp is already running the experiment live; the other is still writing it down.

Dispatch: Prague

Fifteen Years of Quiet Firsts

BTC Prague spent the day retelling its own city's history, one year at a time. 2010. Marek "Slush" Palatinus is solo mining in Prague, realizes it's pointless, and writes a system that lets small miners pool their machines and split the reward. First bitcoin mining pool in the world. it's still running, now as Braiins Pool.

Then 2014: a black building on Dělnická opens a cafe that refuses cash. Bitcoin or no coffee. Paralelní Polis. for over a decade it's where the European cypherpunk scene actually met. it wound down in 2024 and the building closed for good in March 2026. The people didn't go anywhere.

Then 2025: Tropic Square, out of Prague, ships TROPIC01: the first secure element in a mass-market consumer device that anyone can audit without signing an NDA. Open silicon. same scene, fifteen years later.

The thread closed with next year's dates, and a small joke about why anyone should trust the account telling it: After every edition we send out a survey. Nobody gets paid. Nobody gets asked for a testimonial. Half the questions are about what we got wrong. None of that is our copy. it's just what people typed into a form after they went home. BTC Prague 2027 runs May 6 to 8, bitcoin only.

Community

Builders Who Ran Out of Workshop Space Built One

Sovereign Engineering, the community's builder residency, wrapped its eighth cohort this week — and some participants left with a bigger project than the one they came for. Some participants come to Soveng carrying more than their laptops. They arrive with large backpacks and cases full of equipment to build. We saw this again at SEC-08, which just ended, with hardware projects such as Totem and Tollgate. Without a shared workshop or access to the right tools on the island, some builders could not do everything they had hoped to do.

Two of them decided to fix that themselves. A couple of participants decided to change that and began planning a small, shared fab lab for the community and were prepared to fund it themselves. Others joined in: What began with a couple of participants choosing to solve a problem has become a shared effort, with 3 million sats raised so far. The first purchases are ordinary ones: a 3D printer, a workbench, storage, tools.

Dev Wire

FIPS Reaches v0.5.0, and Git Gets Two More Ways to Live on Nostr

Johnathan Corgan's mesh-networking project shipped a release built mostly out of other people's contributions. We've got exciting news for you, another FIPS release! New features, new platforms and many, many bugfixes! We've landed the first version of the native API that lets you interact with other nodes over FIPS directly, without going through IP first. Android and FreeBSD are now supported and much more.

Elsewhere on the network's plumbing, DanConwayDev shipped two companion tools for keeping code on Nostr rather than GitHub: ngit-grasp, a relay that validates Git writes against signed Nostr proofs, and ngit, the command-line client that keeps issues and pull requests on Nostr while handing the actual files to ordinary Git servers.