Episode 1: Pieter Wuille (part 1 of 2)

For our first episode, we talked to Bitcoin Core contributor Pieter Wuille.

Pieter has been a Bitcoin protocol developer and contributor to Bitcoin Core since 2011. In that time, he’s authored or contributed to some of the most important developments, including segwit, bech32, libsecp, HD wallets, schnorr and taproot, and many others.

We talked to Pieter about his thoughts on some of those influential PRs, including headers-first syncing and ultraprune, and hear about the motivation for those changes and how he thinks about them now. This is a two-parter and in the next episode, we’ll hear about libsecp and Pieter’s thoughts about Bitcoin in 2020.

Discussed in this episode:

• Headers-first syncing (3:30)
• Tracking peer state and finding good peers (13:00)
• How Bitcoin Core development culture has changed in the last 9 years (18:11)
• Bitcoin test evolution (19:00)
• Ultraprune (21:55)
• March 2013 Consensus Fork (26:50):
  - March 2013 Chain Fork Post-Mortem
  - Analyzing the 2013 Bitcoin fork

Thank you to Matthew Zipkin for sound engineering.