Earlier this month, I had the chance to attend the MIT Bitcoin Expo, where I sat down for a chat with Antoine Poinsot, a developer working on Bitcoin Core.

Antoine is currently contributing his expertise at Chaincode Labs, and he previously worked at Wizardsardine, a bitcoin security firm known for creating Revault, a vault system using pre-signed transactions, and Liana, a Bitcoin wallet based on miniscript. He’s been actively involved in Bitcoin development, with his first contribution merged into Bitcoin Core back on May 16th, 2019.

Our conversation centered around the “Great Consensus Cleanup” proposal, a soft fork idea for the Bitcoin protocol that Antoine is championing. This proposal is actually inspired by Matt Corallo’s original version from 2019.

Over the years, Bitcoin has unfortunately experienced its share of bugs, including some serious incidents like the 2010 inflation bug. While thankfully not on that scale, there are still some less severe, but nonetheless problematic, bugs lingering in the protocol.

Antoine explained the various protocol bugs and the solutions he’s suggesting to fix them. He pointed out that some of these are arguably just “foot guns”—easy to avoid if you know they’re there—but others are genuine flaws that could pose a significant risk to the Bitcoin network.

Want to hear the full conversation? You can watch the interview right here: