I needed to understand merge mining for a particular research direction I am pursuing (relating to stale blocks), and created the following visualisation-rich piece on the topic. Hoping this makes it easier for some to grok how it all works, especially AuxPoW!

Merge mining and AuxPoW: how it works

deadmanoz's website

Great overview video of the priorities, methodologies and achievements of Bitcoin Core from @schmidty at OPNEXT’26 a few weeks ago

I mean, this is obvious in hindsight, but I only learnt about the following today.. Since SegWit, any block with witness-bearing transactions has required the coinbase to have an OP_RETURN carrying the witness commitment. This is what extends PoW to cover witness data (the spending authority), which SegWit moved out of the txid computation!!

I love my @daylightco Daylight Computer 1, writing on it just feels soooo natural and satisfying But Daylight Desktop on macOS is buggy as hell, hasn’t been updated in over a year Similarly the Reader app on device also wigs out on a bunch of PDFs So, I do have to ask, is it abandonware?

“White House Considers Vetting A.I. Models Before They Are Released” We’re there already are we? This will just push people to non-American model ecosystems, they’re only a few month behind at the moment, IMO https://archive.is/V7HaO

I wanted to remain Nostr only, and will absolutely primarily post openly on Nostr, but damn, I wish there was more AI/ML and Bitcoin discussion and signal here (reluctantly frequenting X more frequently)

When an agent is deep in some obscure low-level code I don’t really have an interest in, and my eyes start to glaze over.. ..I finally have a glimpse of what it is like to be a non-technical product manager

Reading old BitcoinTalk threads, many just ooze critical thinking and deep thought Where has it all gone? I guess there is many orders of magnitude more noise these days, so it’s harder for signal to cut through

Kids used to “have ants in their pants” Now they’ve got ADHD

Experts offer theories on why WA is 'wild west' for ADHD prescriptions

With WA home to seven out of Australia's top-10 highest ADHD prescribing neighbourhoods, experts, psychiatrists and doctors weigh in with their the...

The Big Stuff “Lotions & Potions for MEN”™️ https://fountain.fm/episode/TK0lnLralJ7vjKMRERXX

Torn between liberal democracies needing to win the AI race and the best and most competitive open source efforts not coming from liberal democracies

Hot damn… just had a router just flat out randomly die on me today Think I cooked it!!

To get to a “country of geniuses in a data centre” you have to go through “a large university research lab of graduate students in a data centre” I think we’re almost at that point

I set out to ground myself on what the most important properties of the Bitcoin network are, and in working to establish this I have landed on a random side-quest relating to… merged mining? 🤷 (it appears that there is some signal in this area for the purpose of Bitcoin network monitoring)

For Science™️… https://fountain.fm/episode/1mieRW00BVL4hsQQHBYd

@Spiral should post on Nostr more!!

X (formerly Twitter)

Spiral (@spiralbtc) on X

Now and then, you sponsor a grantee who presents you with a conundrum: you can 1) try to respectfully summarize their accomplishments in a way that...

Realised I had a lot of knowledge gaps to fill so I filled some of them in writing this piece

Bitcoin node roles and network topology

deadmanoz's website

📣📣📣 Perth BitDevs/Bitcoin Meetup for April 2026 When: TONIGHT - Thursday 2nd April, 6pm Where: Rocky Ridge Brewing Co, Burswood Topics: * BIP-54 Consensus Cleanup - timewarp fix, validation time limits, Merkle tree hardening, deployment debate * BIP-110 update - Sybil nodes exposed, willcl_ark crawler shows only 254 genuine nodes out of 3,312 * PQ signature advances - lattice-based HD wallets (BIP-32-style key derivation for post-quantum) * SHRIMPS - Jonas Nick's 2.5KB multi-device stateful hash-based PQ signatures, successor to SHRINCS * IBD optimizations - l0rinc's ~16% speedup, Ruben Somsen's SwiftSync (5x faster), LevelDB tuning * Bitcoin TUI - terminal user interface for Bitcoin Core * Fuzzor Dashboard - Niklas Goegge's live fuzzing coverage dashboard for Bitcoin Core * Channel splicing BOLT merged - 8 years from concept to spec, resize channels without closing * Rare 2-block reorg at height 941,881 * ProductionReady - new "conservative" Bitcoin client, 501(c)(3) from Jimmy Song, Samson Mow, Parker Lewis * ...and more! Suggestions are open for additional topics to discuss!

GitHub

April bit devs · Issue #34 · PerthBitDevs/PerthBitDevs

April 2026 Perth BitDevs Perth BitDevs/Bitcoin Meetup is (almost) always held on the first Thursday of each month When: 6pm Thursday 2nd April 2026...

Perth BitDevs

Monthly socratic seminar exploring Bitcoin development, protocol changes, and the broader technical ecosystem.

Pick almost any aspect of Bitcoin and prepare to be humbled and ready for a deep rabbit hole. Currently digging into addr, addrv2, getaddr, et al and boy, there’s much more to these aspects than appears on the surface. "Token bucket" rate limiters, 6 or 7 different peer types, 24-hour cache for getaddr response, etc etc 😅

Pretty impressed with qwen3.5 35B as a private local model. Integrated vision, decent tool calling, reasoning/thinking that can be toggled. It’s slow but has proven adequate in an OpenClaw harness for a few workflows I’ve got - private document interpretation/processing/organisation I do wonder what the hardware requirements are for such local models to be capable of most general consumer use cases (this model at 35B is not there), probably100s of GB at this point in time?