Tadge Dryja on Scaling Bitcoin With Utreexo

Interview Location: Boston
Interview Date: Thursday 20th June 2019
Company: MIT Digital Currency Initiative
Role: Research Scientist

Scaling has been a constant thorn in the side of Bitcoin. Solutions for scaling has led to a civil war, multiple forks and is the centre of many arguments on Reddit and Twitter.

The Bitcoin blockchain is currently around 230GB and syncing the blockchain can take multiple days. This is just one of the barriers which may put people off running the software, but what if you could run it on your phone? That is exactly what Tadge is trying to achieve with Utreexo. By not worrying about the full history of the blockchain and only concentrating on data that is relevant to you this may be the solution for the ever increasing size of the data.

As well as discussing Utreexo we also get into:
- Whether everyone should run a full Bitcoin node
- Getting Utreexo into Bitcoin Core
- How block explorers can be misleading
- What an accumulator is
- Taproot and Schnorr signatures

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Helpful Links:

Connect with Tadge:
- On Twitter @tdryja
- On LinkedIn
- On Medium
- On CrunchBase
- On GitHub
- On Messari
- At MIT

Mentioned in the interview:
- Utreexo Whitepaper
- Utreexo at MIT
- Lightning Network Whitepaper

Other relevant WBD podcasts:
- WBD109: Luke Dashjr on 300k Blocks and Full Nodes
- WBD110: Andrew Poelstra on Schnorr, Taproot & Graft Root Coming to Bitcoin
- WBD107: Daniel Buchner on Why Microsoft is Building Decentralised IDs on Bitcoin
- WBD106: Bitcoin Block Reorgs Explained with Adam Back and Bryan Bishop
- WBD100: Tadge Dryja on the Limitations of the Lightning Network
- WBD085: Andrew Poelstra on Bitcoin Math & Research
- WBD074: How Bitcoin Works with Matt Corallo
- WBD057: Core Developer Bryan Bishop on Building Bitcoin
- WBD047: Adam Back on a Decade of Bitcoin

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