The Great Consensus Cleanup w/ Antoine Poinsot

Antoine Poinsot’s describes the proposed “Great Consensus Cleanup” soft fork. Originally by Matt Corallo in 2019 and recently revived, the proposal addresses four critical Bitcoin protocol vulnerabilities: Time Warp (which allows 51% attackers to artificially increase block rates), expensive validation blocks (that can take up to 90 minutes to validate), Merkle tree construction weaknesses (enabling transaction malleability), and duplicate transaction issues. Poinsot details technical solutions for each problem and discusses implementation approaches.

This presentation was recorded live at 2025’s OPNEXT, the Bitcoin scaling conference. For more info, visit opnext.dev. OPNEXT livestream and VODs are made possible by Taproot Wizards.

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# Notes:

– Time Warp can reduce difficulty to Genesis in 38 days

– Worst block takes 90 minutes to validate on Raspberry Pi

– 64-byte transactions enable Merkle tree vulnerabilities

– Proposal revives Matt Corallo’s 2019 initiative

– Fixes don’t require bundling with other soft forks

– Standard transactions unaffected by proposed changes

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