We're Breaking Up
Our blog, that is.
News About Our Newsletter
Having wondered once or twice in the past whether our blog posts were too dense (hundreds of links, thousands of words, meta-narratives that ran for years), we’ve moved to Substack and split our newsletter into five digestible verticals that will make what we’re working on clearer to our beautiful, beautiful audience.
Here’s some of what you can expect in 2025 and beyond:
Nerd of the Month
We are one of the largest givers of free and open-source (FOSS) grants to developers, designers, and creatives within the bitcoin space. However, while Conor Okus (@conorokus) has kept us pretty sharp when announcing new and renewed grants, we (me) have been less than stellar at letting you know how their work is going.
Nerd of the Month will change that by highlighting what you need to know about our grantees and their projects.
Plushie Confidential
By now, if you’re even a little aware of our existence, you’ve probably seen either Bitty, the giant bitcoin puppet we’ve been making videos and doing international photoshoots with for over a year, or Itty Bitty, his tiny equivalent. These two open-source IPs (yes, we’re so bitcoin-pilled that we consider puppets and plushies open-source) call herecomesbitcoin.org home, a website whose goal is to make bitcoin funnier, friendlier, and more accessible by providing free, high-fidelity creative assets to anyone building or just messing around within bitcoin.
Plushie Confidential will talk in the open about our plans for Itty Bitty and, to a lesser extent, Bitty, as they mature from just an idea we waded into on a whim to, we hope, icons within the bitcoin community both for OGs and precoiners alike.
The Scroll
There’s a thing in bitcoin called Bitcoin Wizards: highly technical, deep in the weeds, forward-thinking engineers. There’s also a thing online called “scrolling” in case you didn’t get the joke.
Spiral’s Bitcoin Wizards lead a team study club for anyone at Spiral wanting to dive deeper into technical proposals and ideas in the bitcoin space, such as covenants, scaling UTXO sharing, and privacy. The Scroll will bring discussions like these and others to you. Like no other vertical we’ll be creating, this will be the one that goes deep and requires the most, well (here’s that joke again)… scrolling.
What’s Matt Mad at Now
Matt Corallo (@thebluematt), one of the first ten bitcoin developers, was also one of Spiral’s earliest hires, coming in just after Steve Lee, our unquestionably charismatic lead. Matt is known throughout the Bitcoin community for his prestigious and prolific contributions to bitcoin’s codebase. He’s also known for applying a rigorous filter to everything he says online. This is what’s known in comedic circles as a “joke.” Such a filter does not exist.
But there lies the opportunity. This new vertical will give Matt a longer platform to broadcast his thoughts about what’s happening in bitcoin, what should happen, what will happen, and what needs to happen. If you like your takes spicy, this vertical is for you.
The Lightning Development Kit
Our biggest project to date remains the Lightning Development Kit, or LDK, a massive undertaking between our team and the open-source bitcoin community that helps developers easily create Lighting Network-compatible apps and wallets. Because there is so much to say about this massive project’s development, it is another one of those areas where our quarterly blog posts weren’t cutting it for updates. So, it will join the ranks of better-named verticals and get its newsletter released under the renewed Spiral blog posts umbrella.
Finally
Since asking readers to sign up for up to five different newsletters is what you might call “really bad UX,” we won’t be asking you to sign up for each of these verticals individually. One signup gets you everything. Don’t think Plushie Confidential is for you? Skip it, you heartless brute; it’s not like adorable, trouble-making plush toys are for everyone.
If you aren’t already subscribed and are as excited for this new venture as at least a few other terminally online bitcoin weirdos are, subscribe below.