There sure has been a lot of *talk* about Bitcoin development these last 18 months. Meanwhile, there's been an awful lot of actual development work done. Examples of what Bitcoin Core has been working on throughout this all: - a node that syncs in nearly half the time - a path to 5x faster (SwiftSync) - a new GUI to make running that node easier, maybe even on mobile - a redesigned mempool with better fee bumping and fee estimates - a mining interface so individual miners can build their own block templates (Stratum v2) - a private broadcast so your transactions can't be traced to your IP - a reproducible map of the entire internet for node eclipse attack protection - a better way to relay time-sensitive Lightning and Ark transactions for confirmation - a multisig that's cheaper, more private, and looks like any other payment on-chain (MuSig2) - a private payment address with zero linkable payments (silent payments) - a threshold (e.g. 3-of-5) signature scheme that looks like a single signature (FROST) - a proposal to fix known protocol bugs and current attack vectors (BIP54) - a slew of post-quantum research to be ready for future attack vectors - a first-ever independent security audit for more eyes on the code - a new tool that attacks a live node the way a real adversary would (Fuzzamoto) - a fix that killed an entire class of disk-filling attacks - a replacement for a risky external library - a consensus engine the whole ecosystem can build on (Bitcoin Kernel) Over a hundred contributors and more than a dozen funding organizations around the world. Not without controversy. Not without bugs. But undeniable progress. August will come and go. This work will continue.

With an increasing number of discussions around the BIP54 “Consensus Cleanup” soft fork proposal, I helped put together an information site about BIP54. “Bitcoin has four known vulnerabilities that have gone unfixed for 15 years. BIP54, "Consensus Cleanup", proposes four narrowly-scoped changes to address these issues in Bitcoin's consensus rules that date back to the original version of Bitcoin in 2009.” bip54.org/