Since July 2022, Optech contributors Mike Schmidt and Mark “Murch” Erhardt have been joined on Twitter Spaces by members of the community and leading Bitcoin and LN protocol developers to discuss the events summarized in each week’s Optech Newsletter. Each of those discussions will now be available as episodes on all major podcast platforms.

Each episode will also be available as a page on the Optech website with a summary of the episode content and a complete transcript. We think this is a major advance in Optech’s mission to improve communication between open source projects and downstream users and businesses.

Anyone who wants to keep track of Bitcoin and LN protocol development can subscribe to either the newsletter (if they like reading) or the podcast (if they prefer listening). If they discover a topic through the newsletter that they want to know more about, they can find out what experienced Bitcoin contributors are saying about the topic by listening to the podcast episode or reading its transcript. Or, if they first hear about an interesting topic through the podcast, they can use that week’s newsletter to immediately find the original discussions on a mailing list or pull request.

To make it easy to move between the newsletter and the podcast, both sources are cross-indexed to each other. With one click at the end of a newsletter item, you’ll be taken to the corresponding item on a podcast episode. From there, you can immediately jump to that part of the audio episode or the transcript. From the summary at the top of each podcast page, each item links directly to the part of the original newsletter it describes.

Years from now, users, developers, and researchers will be able to look up a subject in Optech’s extensive topic index, choose a particular item of interest, review a brief summary of the event in the newsletter, and then hear or read contemporary discussion about the subject from users and experts—often including the experts who contributed the most to that subject and the users who felt the most strongly about it.

Of course, the podcast audio and transcripts, like all Optech content, is available under an open source license.

New podcast episodes will be released a few days after the conclusion of a Twitter Spaces to allow for professional post production of the audio. Transcripts will be published a few days after that. In addition to publishing new episodes as soon as they’re complete, Optech’s audio and transcription teams will gradually be publishing old episodes.

If you’re interested in Bitcoin technology, we encourage you to subscribe to the podcast and consider joining us each week for a new recap on Twitter Spaces.