The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Crypto / fintech

Rusty Russell’s Quiet Corner of The Internet

rusty.ozlabs.org

I have been a full time Free Software developer since the 90’s. I worked on the Linux Kernel, where I wrote ipchains, iptables, and rewrote the module subsystem, along with many other things. I changed careers in 2015 to work on Bitcoin full time, and was the first person to implement Lightning: I t

Crypto / fintechCLinux / Unix

’10’15’20’25
Posts
133 from 26 Oct 2009 to 12 Apr 2026
Posting
monthly (7 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://rusty.ozlabs.org/feed.xml

2026 1

  1. CLN Developer Series #7: Post-Release Deprecations

2025 6

  1. CLN Developer Series #6: Neatening a Bugfix PR
  2. CLN Developer Series #5: Gossipd: The Gossip Daemon
  3. CLN Developer Series #4: Finding A Gossip Bug
  4. CLN Developer Series #3: The Tal Heirarchical Allocator
  5. CLN Developer Series: Overview of CLN Development
  6. CLN Developer Series #2: The CCAN Utilities

2024 4

  1. Restoring Bitcoin’s Full Script Power
  2. Pay-to-Tapscript: Keyless Entry For Better Future Scripting
  3. Transaction Stacking for Covenant Fee Minimization
  4. OP_SEGMENT: Allowing Introspection to Check Partial Scripts

2023 7

  1. Arithmetic Opcodes: What Could They Look Like?
  2. OP_CAT beyond 520 bytes
  3. Covenants: Dealing with Amounts in Bitcoin Script
  4. Covenants: Examining ScriptPubkeys in Bitcoin Script
  5. The HRF Bounty On Human-Readable Offers
  6. Covenants in Bitcoin: A Useful Review Taxonomy
  7. Covenants Via Signatures

2022 1

  1. Pickhardt Payments Implementation: Finding μ!

2021 3

  1. Onion Messaging In Depth
  2. A Model for Bitcoin Soft Fork Activation
  3. Bitcoin Consensus and Solidarity

2020 2

  1. 57 Varieties of Pyrite: Exchanges Are Now The Enemy of Bitcoin
  2. Australian Tax Office Treatment of Bitcoin (etc) Forks: Trouble Ahead

2019 4

  1. New Release: c-lightning 0.7.2
  2. The Cost of Bitcoin’s Security
  3. Quick Lightning Channel Stats (31-Jan-19)
  4. Proposal: The Million Channel (Lightning) Project

2018 3

  1. My Experience of the Second Lightning Developer Summit
  2. Open Questions About Bitcoin’s Nakamoto Consensus
  3. The Corrosion of Ethics in Cryptocurrencies

2017 3

  1. Celebrating Lightning Development
  2. Broadband Speeds, 2 Years Later
  3. Quick Stats on zstandard (zstd) Performance

2016 4

  1. Minor update on transaction fees: users still don't care.
  2. Bitcoin Generic Address Format Proposal
  3. BIP9: versionbits In a Nutshell
  4. Bitcoin And Stuck Transactions?

2015 18

  1. Bitcoin: Mixed Signs of A Fee Market
  2. ccan/mem's memeqzero iteration
  3. Broadband Speeds, New Data
  4. The Bitcoin Blocksize: A Summary
  5. The Megatransaction: Why Does It Take 25 Seconds?
  6. Bitcoin Core CPU Usage With Larger Blocks
  7. Wrapper for running perf on part of a program.
  8. Hashing Speed: SHA256 vs Murmur3
  9. Mining on a Home DSL connection: latency for 1MB and 8MB blocks
  10. Current Blocksize, by graphs.
  11. What Transactions Get Crowded Out If Blocks Fill?
  12. Block size: rate of internet speed growth since 2008?
  13. Some bitcoin mempool data: first look
  14. Lightning Networks Part IV: Summary
  15. Lightning Networks Part III: Channeling Contracts
  16. Lightning Networks Part II: Hashed Timelock Contracts (HTLCs)
  17. Lightning Networks Part I: Revocable Transactions
  18. lguest Learns PCI

2014 12

  1. POLLOUT doesn't mean write(2) won't block: Part II
  2. ccan/io: revisited
  3. Pettycoin Alpha01 Tagged
  4. API Bug of the Week: getsockname().
  5. Alternate Blog for my Pettycoin Work
  6. Rusty Goes on Sabbatical, June to December
  7. Donation to Jupiter Broadcasting
  8. Effects of packet/data sizes on various networks
  9. BTC->BPAY gateway (for Australians)
  10. Legal Questions About Localbitcoins.com and Australia
  11. Bitcoin Trading In Australia
  12. Pettycoin and working with limited visibility.

2013 8

  1. linux.conf.au 2014: Rusty's Must See List
  2. Git prompt for bash
  3. On Linux-Kernel Mailing List Behavior
  4. 6 Technical Things I Learned About Bitcoin
  5. VIRTIO Growing Up: OASIS Standard Technical Committee
  6. Thanks for the Bitcoin donation!
  7. GCC and C vs C++ Speed, Measured.
  8. Looking forward to linux.conf.au 2013

2012 11

  1. Fixed-length semi-lockless queues revisited
  2. Fixed-length semi-lockless queues...
  3. Kernel Compilation Times
  4. Latinoware 2012
  5. What Can I Do To Help?
  6. FAQ: CCAN as a shared library?
  7. Sources of Randomness for Userspace
  8. 1 Week to Go, and Rusty Goes Offline
  9. Oh, BTW, I Am Engaged!
  10. A Plea For Help: Charity
  11. Why Everyone Must Oppose The Merging of /usr and /

2011 14

  1. The Power of Undefined Values
  2. PLUG: Coding: let's have fun!
  3. linux.conf.au: Hacking your badge for lca2012
  4. Speeding CCAN Testing (By Not Optimizing)
  5. Professional Photographers and Licensing: Copyright Sucks
  6. License Boilerplates
  7. Bitcoin for something useful.
  8. Waiting For The Great Bitcoin Crash (GBC)
  9. "If you didn't run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn't boot"
  10. A small success: LWN Supporter Option.
  11. On Conference Preparation Time...
  12. Summary of "Advanced C Coding For Fun!"
  13. The LCA Dinner Rule
  14. Source from "Advanced C Programming for Fun!"

2010 28

  1. On C Linked Lists
  2. On Conference Harrassment...
  3. Not Buying Another HTC
  4. The Art of Community (TAoC)
  5. Hashtables vs Judy Arrays, Round 1
  6. A nomenclature anecdote
  7. LWN Supporter Subscription: Take My Money!
  8. On C Library Implementation
  9. Being Sampled for The Genographic Project
  10. ccan/opt
  11. Back To Cacheline Tree Hash Tables
  12. fcntl lock starvation and TDB
  13. Bob Jenkins and lookup8.c
  14. On Barriers To Entry
  15. Superfreakonomics; Superplug for Intellectual Ventures.
  16. LWN Quotes Of The Week
  17. Typesafe callbacks in C (and gcc)
  18. More Realistic Hashing: Cache Sensitivity Part II
  19. Hash Tables: In A Cache-Sensitive World? (FIXED)
  20. Linux Users of Victoria: Tuesday 6th April
  21. Rusty's Travels
  22. Followup: lrzip
  23. xz vs rzip
  24. Code review: libreplace
  25. linux.conf.au 2010
  26. Code Reviewing: popt
  27. Coding Fail: Rusty Breaks Booting
  28. More Linux-next Graphing

2009 4

  1. Google Analytics For WordPress Upgrade Fail
  2. A Week With Android (HTC Magic)
  3. Not Always Lovely Blooms...
  4. Rusty Finally Enters Web 1.1