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Pieter Wuille

From the Bitcoin Takeover Wiki · ✓ 11 sources · 0 podcast anchors · built 2026-11-13

Bitcoin Core developer (sipa), co-founder of Blockstream, and author or co-author of the BIPs behind SegWit, version bits and Taproot.

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The wiki's angle: if you trace the soft forks that actually activated after 2015, Wuille's name is on nearly every specification, from SegWit's consensus BIP to all three Taproot BIPs. Fork Wars treats his December 2015 SegWit talk as the technical origin of the path that activated in 2017.[7][3][5]

Contents

  1. Specifications
  2. SegWit and Hong Kong
  3. Blockstream and after
  4. References

Specifications

Wuille is the sole author of BIP-66, strict DER signatures[1]. He co-authored BIP-9, the version-bits mechanism, with Peter Todd, Greg Maxwell and Rusty Russell[2], and BIP-141, Segregated Witness, with Eric Lombrozo and Johnson Lau[3]. He is the first-listed author of BIP-340 (Schnorr signatures, with Jonas Nick and Tim Ruffing)[4] and of BIP-341 and BIP-342 (Taproot and Tapscript, with Jonas Nick and Anthony Towns)[5][6].

SegWit and Hong Kong

Bitcoin Takeover's Fork Wars timeline records that Wuille presented Segregated Witness at the Scaling Bitcoin workshop in Hong Kong on 6–7 December 2015, and calls that talk “the technical origin of the path that would, eventually, activate on Bitcoin in August 2017”[7]. See Segregated Witness.

Blockstream and after

Wikipedia lists Wuille, with Gregory Maxwell, among the developers who founded Blockstream with Adam Back in 2014[8]. His GitHub profile now describes him as a Bitcoin developer at Chaincode Labs, “Formerly @Blockstream”[9]. In January 2021 Wladimir van der Laan's count of Bitcoin Core merges in 2020 listed 7 by Wuille[10].

References

  1. primaryBIP-66 (Strict DER signatures), Pieter Wuille [archived]
  2. primaryBIP-9 (Version bits with timeout and delay) [archived]
  3. primaryBIP-141 (Segregated Witness, consensus layer) [archived]
  4. primaryBIP-340 (Schnorr Signatures for secp256k1), Wuille, Nick, Ruffing [archived]
  5. primaryBIP-341 (Taproot: SegWit version 1 spending rules), Wuille, Nick, Towns [archived]
  6. primaryBIP-342 (Validation of Taproot Scripts), Wuille, Nick, Towns [archived]
  7. btkFork Wars: the block size war timeline (Bitcoin Takeover) [archived]
  8. secondaryWikipedia, “Blockstream” [archived]
  9. primaryGitHub profile of sipa (Pieter Wuille), read 13 Nov 2026 [archived]
  10. primarylaanwj, “The widening gyre”, Laanwj's blog, 21 Jan 2021 [archived]
  11. primarybitcoin/bips README (BIP index with authors) [archived]

Related

Segregated Witness
The 2017 soft fork that moved signatures out of the legacy block, fixed malleability and became the centre of
Taproot activation (2021)
The Schnorr/Taproot soft fork, signalled through Speedy Trial in 2021, locked in at block 687,285 and activate
BIP9 (version bits)
The 2015 mechanism that lets miners signal for several soft forks in parallel using bits of the block version,
Blockstream
The Bitcoin infrastructure company co-founded by Adam Back, Pieter Wuille and Gregory Maxwell in 2014.
Gregory Maxwell
Bitcoin Core developer behind CoinJoin and a Blockstream co-founder, central to the SegWit-first capacity road
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