Bitcoin Core Developer Antoine Poinsot: The Great Consensus Cleanup

While attending the MIT Bitcoin Expo earlier this month I was able to sit down with Bitcoin Core developer Antoine Poinsot.

Currently at Chaincode Labs, Antoine was previously at Wizardsardine, a bitcoin security company behind Revault, a pre-signed transaction based vault, and Liana, a miniscript based Bitcoin wallet. Antoine’s first commit was merged to Bitcoin Core on May 16th, 2019.

We discussed the Great Consensus Cleanup proposal Antoine is putting forward as a prospective soft fork of the Bitcoin protocol modeled on Matt Corallo’s original verson of the proposal from 2019.

Bitcoin has suffered from numerous bugs over the years, with some notably severe events like the inflation bug from 2010. There are still some bad bugs in the protocol, not that bad, but bad nonetheless.

Antoine talks about these different protocol bugs, and his proposed solutions to address them. Some are arguably merely foot guns that are easy to account for if you are aware of them, but some of them are very serious flaws that could present a real risk to the Bitcoin network.

You can watch the interview here: