The History of SegWit and Taproot | with Pieter Wuille

A primary maintainer of Bitcoin Core from 2011-2022, Pieter Wuille is arguably the most influential developer in Bitcoin’s history since Satoshi himself.

After receiving keys to the Bitcoin codebase from Gavin Andersen, who was tasked with maintaining the codebase by Satoshi Nakamoto, Pieter went on to implement some of Bitcoin’s most dramatic and influential upgrades—including but not limited to:

• Implementation of Bitcoin’s Taproot and Segwit upgrades
• Implementation of libsecp256k + Bitcoin’s unique encoding structure for the cryptography securing all Bitcoin public/private keys.
• The first import/export feature for Bitcoin private keys into Bitcoin (now Bitcoin Core)
• Development of hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets, enabling backups via a single seedphrase and paving the way for seedphrases themselves
• DER signatures, Miniscript, and so much more.

A truly special episode of Bitcoin Rails, this is a rare long-form interview with one of the most important historical figures in the arc of Bitcoin’s development.

Pieter and I walk through how Bitcoin consensus works in practice, the history of Bitcoin's most critical early developments, and the key role of his good friend, Greg Maxwell, nearly every step of the way.

This episode of Bitcoin Rails is powered by: — Best In Slot - the leading API for Ordinals and BRC-20 data aggregation and indexing. — Spark - a statechains implementation advancing Bitcoin-powered payments. — Citrea - a leading Bitcoin rollup technology and BitVM alliance contributor.