SUNDAY, APR05
1. Script Restoration BIPs, 2. Satoshi's quantum defense revisited, 3. Miners and AI chase, 4. 66% of users behind state firewalls
From Proto and Bitkey - part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
1. restoration
Rusty Russell and Julian Moik have submitted a formal pull request to the Bitcoin BIPs repository for the first two drafts of their “Script Restoration” proposal, moving the varops budget and tapscript leaf 0xc2 specifications toward official BIP number assignment. The submission, posted to the Bitcoin development mailing list, represents the next step for a proposal that would re-enable and expand Bitcoin’s scripting capabilities within carefully benchmarked safety limits. The only substantive change since the prior discussion is that operational costs for hashing and byte-copying have increased after benchmarking across a wider range of hardware, following what Russell describes as a “conservative approach to make the worst-case validation times no worse than they are presently.” Two additional planned BIPs covering OP_TX and new opcodes were not included in this submission, as they serve primarily as a roadmap for functional gaps and lack full implementations. The filing signals continued momentum toward restoring expressive scripting on Bitcoin while maintaining the network’s validation performance guarantees.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY2. quantum
Satoshi Nakamoto early thinking about Bitcoin vulnerability to quantum computing, outlined in a 2010 forum post describing a migration path away from compromised keys, is being revisited as new Google research suggests the timeline for cryptographically relevant quantum attacks may be closer than previously assumed. According to Micah Zimmerman, Google quantum team has released research indicating that quantum hardware capable of breaking elliptic curve cryptography could arrive on a compressed timeline, forcing the Bitcoin developer community to accelerate work on post-quantum cryptographic upgrades. Satoshi proposed defense, allowing users to migrate funds to quantum-resistant address formats before an attack becomes feasible, remains the conceptual foundation for current proposals, but the 2026 environment requires that concept to graduate from theory to deployed protocol. The broader question is whether Bitcoin decentralized governance process can coordinate on a migration of this complexity before the threat window narrows.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY3. engine
Bitcoin miners and AI data center operators are converging on identical engineering constraints, according to Wolfie Zhao in The Energy Mag, with power access, not hardware, now the defining limit for both industries. The piece compares the infrastructure stacks of both industries and finds near-identical dependencies: semiconductor manufacturing, global logistics, cooling systems, and grid connection capacity. Strip away the differences in workload, and both industries are fundamentally solving the same engineering problem: how to convert large amounts of electricity into useful computation at an industrial scale, Zhao writes. The critical distinction is revenue model. Bitcoin mining competes for open-network rewards while AI data centers depend on customer contracts. With over 20 million bitcoin already issued and AI capex accelerating globally, Zhao argues that the decade-long expertise bitcoin miners developed in securing large-scale electricity access is now the most transferable skill set in the broader compute industry, giving mining operators a structural advantage as both sectors compete for the same constrained grid capacity.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY4. censorship
The Electronic Frontier Foundation Digital Hopes Real Power series documents the scale of internet censorship globally, finding that 66 percent of internet users live in countries where political or social websites are blocked, and 78 percent live in jurisdictions where people have been arrested for online posts. According to EFF researchers, the original promise of the internet as a decentralizing force has been progressively captured by governments that built or purchased the infrastructure to control it. The piece traces how network architecture once built for free expression has been reengineered for surveillance and suppression, with each new layer of internet governance tilting further toward state control. Populations most in need of censorship-resistant financial tools are largely the same populations living behind internet censorship regimes, where the ability to transact privately depends on the same infrastructure required to communicate freely.
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