bitcoin++ villain edition 2026
2026-04-23..2026-04-24
Boulder City, United States
Bitcoin ·
[Bitcoin 2024, Bitcoin 2025, bitcoin++ villain edition 2026]
as the organisers put it
bitcoin++ is villainizing bitcoin at the Hoover Dam. This intimate, 100-person event is happening just before the Vegas conference. Join us for two days of scheming at bitcoin++’s first ever unconference style summit.
who it's for
protocol researchers, layer2 engineers, Bitcoin developers, miners and mining pool operators, node operators, wallet developers, cryptographers
topics
mempool policy as administrative state; non-standard OP_RETURNs broadcasting; BitVM3 bridge proofs; bridgeless rollup construction; round transaction VTXOs (Ark); NostrMail wordlist encoding (BIP39); nation state hash wars; timelocked outputs with musigD; input-committing covenant primitives (OP_CAT/OP_TXHASH/CTV); tail emissions economics; proofless client-side validation; quantum threats debate (FUD vs compute)
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Kickoff | niftynei | 11m |
Conference opens with logistics and ground rules: schedule posts, breakfast 9:30, lunch 11:30–1, coffee break 2:30, and an hour tours starting at 11:30… | ||
| char if we were villainmaxxing | Jeremy Rubin | 15m |
Char Network is a bitcoin-native sequencer producing a verifiable log of pre-commits for validium rollups, using funds locked in timelocked outputs and a… | ||
| 3000 non-standard OP_RETURNs in 1day | Ben Carman | 20m |
Opera Turnbot runs a public service that broadcasts OP_RETURN messages and records concrete metrics: on its biggest day it issues 3,075 non-standard… | ||
| You are wrong about rollups | Janusz | 15m |
Central claim: rollup transactions are simply Bitcoin L1 transactions — a rollup is an opt‑in subset of Bitcoin consensus whose full nodes are Bitcoin full… | ||
| NostrMail | Asher Pembroke | 19m |
NostrMail is a working cross‑platform E2EE email client that uses Nostr for key discovery, lets Gmail/IMAP users send encrypted subjects and bodies by encoding… | ||
| Ark in its essence | Matthew Vuk | 16m |
Defines Ark as on‑chain anchored round transaction with a taproot tree of pre‑signed leaf spends that create ephemeral VTXOs which expire after a fixed window… | ||
| BitVM3, Binohash vs soft forks | EkremBAL | 17m |
BitVM3 cuts disprove/assert transaction sizes from megabytes to kilobytes, lowering operator collateral and making hundreds or thousands of operators… | ||
| Mempool policy | Buck Perley | 28m |
Claim: mempool policy functions as Bitcoin's administrative state, shifting rule-making out of consensus into node defaults. Examples: CPFP carve-outs and… | ||
| Nation State Hash Wars | Kyle Olney | 37m |
Argues that national governments already control enough underutilized energy to materially tilt Bitcoin security: US Army Corps hydro is ~20 GW producing… | ||
| Breaking Ossification | Brandon Black | 23m |
Argues Bitcoin stagnation comes from cultural paralysis, not technical shortage, and lists concrete pressure points: past SegWit/Taproot paths, numerous active… | ||
| Bitcoin Without Controversy | Buck Perley, Jeremy Rubin, Brandon Black, Peter K Todd | 01h 07m |
Panel debates concrete failures and tradeoffs: a proposal for covenants stalled for years, CTV emulation already accounts for roughly one third of value in… | ||
| Proofless Consensus & Client-side Validation | Ying Tong | 31m |
Claim: validation moves entirely to clients while consensus only detects double spends by checking ephemeral pubkeys, reducing on-chain data to a tachygram… | ||
| Villains of the Next Internet. | Ryta | 25m |
Argues agentic AI like OpenClaw and Hermes are shifting from tools to autonomous “children” that can scale from one creator to millions, producing endless… | ||
| PIPEs V2 | Misha Komarov | 30m |
An extension to Bitcoin Script uses witness encryption (a Bartušek–Shah variant) to make non‑consensus opcodes practical by encrypting keys rather than… | ||
| Tail Emissions | Peter K Todd | 27m |
Claim: fees-only rewards are unstable and favor reorg-capable miners; a fixed per-block tail emission converges to replacing lost coins and stabilizes supply… | ||
| Bitcoin to Mars | Brandon Green | 18m |
Argues Bitcoin needs a new block cadence: network propagation to Mars can be ~22 minutes or >1300 seconds, so keeping 10‑minute blocks makes the chain… | ||
| Oxford Debate: Quantum FUD vs Quantum Compute | Brandon Black, Alex Pruden, David Zell | 01h 08m |
Debate argues whether quantum FUD or actual quantum hardware is the bigger danger to Bitcoin: resource estimates fall (20M → 1M → 100k → 10,000 physical qubits… | ||
| nothing matches | ||