Show Notes
Neha Narula is the Director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, where she focuses on Bitcoin research and the broader design tradeoffs of decentralized money systems.
Her work often centers on what Bitcoin gets right—and where it runs into hard limits—especially around scaling, decentralization, and how systems behave as global demand increases.
In this interview, Neha and I explore longer-term risks to Bitcoin—including advancements in quantum computing and the implications of a diminishing block subsidy—as well as the ongoing challenge of scaling Bitcoin without losing access to self-custody.
A thoughtful conversation on how Bitcoin may change in the coming years, we also explore its social and governance dynamics—including tensions within the development community over protocol changes, scaling philosophies, and the future direction of the system.
This episode of Bitcoin Rails is brought to you by:
LayerTwo Labs — developing research, software, and technologies for scaling Bitcoin via the integration of Drivechains (BIP 300/301)
Hashi on Sui Network— a primitive for executing Bitcoin Defi transactions, without having to trust a federated bridge or other centralized entity
BitBox — an open-source Bitcoin-only hardware wallet, with smooth UX and no compromises on security. Check out Bitbox [dot] swiss and use code BITCOINRAILS to get a discount
More from Bitcoin Rails | Isabel Foxen Duke
There are few people as close to the frontlines of Bitcoin privacy as Cake Wallet COO Seth for Privacy. After cutting his teeth building for Monero, Seth turned his focus to Bitcoin in 2022, with the view that making Bitcoin more private would ultimately help more people than focusing on a smaller niche target group alone.
Isabel Foxen Duke sits down with [[alloc] init] co-founder Misha Komarov and Head of Protocol Research Clara Shikhelman to examine PIPEs, a cryptographic framework that utilizes witness encryption—a primitive long dismissed as purely theoretical—to unlock advanced Bitcoin programming without a soft fork.
The first fully specified post-quantum signature scheme for Bitcoin has been proposed to the Bitcoin mailing list.
To date, post-quantum Bitcoin discussions have largely centered on which digital signature schemes offer the strongest cryptographic security against a quantum adversary.
Paul Sztorc founder and CEO of LayerTwo Labs and author of Bitcoin Improvement Proposals 300 and 301 (Drivechains), has been one of Bitcoin's most persistent—and controversial—thinkers, advocating for merge-mined sidechains as a way to dramatically expand Bitcoin's functionality while preserving the security of the base layer.