Sources for the Optech Newsletter

The News section of the newsletter is currently sourced from the following discussion groups:

We will include urgent and important news, such as security announcements, from any source. Otherwise, we normally will not write about any subject unless it has recently been discussed in one of the above sources.

Other parts of the newsletter are based on other sources. In most cases, this is made clear by the section title or by the text introducing the section; for example, the monthly “Bitcoin Core PR Review Club Summary” and “Bitcoin Stack Exchange” sections.

Motivation for only using a few news sources

Ideas for changes to Bitcoin need to be peer reviewed—that way bad ideas can be clearly rejected and good ideas can attract people who will put them into practice. But effective peer review is harder the more discussion becomes spread out across multiple groups. Alice might not be in the same group as Bob, preventing her from seeing his idea. Or, even if she does see it, she may not be able to easily respond to it.

Of course, not everyone is interested in every subject, so any particular group can only scale up to handling a certain variety of topics. After that, it’s natural for it to segment into different groups, just as LN and DLCs are now often discussed separately from Bitcoin in general.

But, when possible, Optech prefers to only track one discussion group per subject. We do this to encourage anyone who wants to see their topic appear in Optech to discuss it in the place where it’s most likely to be seen by their peers. If your idea is important or interesting enough to earn the attention of your peers, then it’s probably important or interesting enough for Optech to write about.

Additionally, only having a short list of sources to check for news makes writing the newsletter each week much more manageable. It’s possible for us to read every post to a small or mid-sized discussion group. It’s not possible for us to read everything about Bitcoin on large social media sites or hundreds of individual blogs.