S6 E9: Jonas Nick, Peter Todd & Alekos Filini on Bitcoin Development

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During day one of the 2020 Paralelni Polis conference, I offered to interview Blockstream developer Jonas Nick. Though he bears the name of one of the Jonas Brothers, Jonas Nick is one of the coders who work on Bitcoin improvements such as Taproot and Schnorr signatures. He is concerned with both the privacy aspect and the scalability of Bitcoin’s base layer, and works on projects that add more on-chain secrecy and also reduce the side of transactions.

When he doesn’t work on Schnorr-related projects, Jonas Nick thinks about improving multisig setups and maintains the Nix-Bitcoin repository (an implementation of the Bitcoin client which uses packages from the NixOS Linux distribution).

In the middle of the interview, conference host Max Hillebrand has brought in two more Bitcoin developers: Peter Todd and Alekos Filini. They both contributed with insights on what it’s like to be a Bitcoin developer and the most important improvements that we will see in the coming future.

If Jonas Nick seemed very much concerned with Bitcoin’s base layer, Peter Todd expressed more excitement in regards to the Lightning Network. It was definitely interesting to listen to their opinions and try to understand how they regard Bitcoin development in the year of 2020.

Another interesting debate that we had concerns CoinJoins and how they can become much more private in the future. They’re certainly not perfect at this point and they don’t provide an ideal transaction anonymity. But with some tweaks and improvements, the Bitcoin base layer will reveal a lot less information and grand everybody more privacy.

Essentially, this is a technical discussion which reveals what some of the most brilliant minds in the space are thinking. So if you enjoy thinking about the near future of Bitcoin, this is a must-listen.

Find out more about the Paralelni Polis conference and its history from Pavol Luptak, one of the founders.