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Last active April 3, 2026 13:23
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Links to my work, accessible via tiny.cc/somsen
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Resources.md

Introduction

I'm Ruben "Bitcoin Sorcerer" Somsen. I do protocol design in order to enhance Bitcoin - SwiftSync, Silent Payments, Spacechains, Statechains, and more.

I'm co-founder/director of the 2140 Foundation together with Josie. We're a stable and independent European hub for Bitcoin development with a physical office in Amsterdam, focused on increasing developer satisfaction, growth, and productivity.

I moderate the bitcoindev mailing list and am involved with the BIP editor process, Delving Bitcoin, and BitDevs Amsterdam. In the past I've run the Seoul Bitcoin Meetup (2014-2020) and co-hosted the Unhashed Podcast (2018-2022).

I publish gists of my work, and post on X/Twitter (I ignore drama), Delving Bitcoin, and the bitcoindev mailing list. You can also join this Telegram group chat to discuss or ask questions about my work.

Bitcoin Sorcery

SwiftSync

Near-stateless, fully parallelizable validation of the blockchain via hints (~100MB) about which outputs remain unspent, eliminating many bottlenecks for a massive speedup

Silent Payments

Receive private payments from anyone on a single static address without requiring any interaction or extra on-chain overhead.

Links:

Spacechains

A permissionless method to create trustless blockchains that improve the Bitcoin ecosystem by explicitly not competing as a store of value. It's a combination of two separate concepts: Blind Merged Mining (BMM) – An auction-based method of mining blocks of other chains by paying BTC miners in bitcoin. The Perpetual One-way Peg (P1WP) – Creating a new token without speculative future value (can't act as store of value).

Links:

Statechains

Swap UTXOs off-chain with the absolute minimal trust in a federation (permissionless peg-out). Can interoperate with Lightning for off-chain channel opening and closing.

Links:

Softchains

Trustless two-way pegged sidechains that need to be enabled via a soft fork. Mainchain users verify each softchain via a novel and succinct consensus validation method (~100MB per chain per year) thanks to Proof-of-Work Fraud Proofs (PoW FP), which ensures users can (slowly) come to consensus by only validating blocks which are disputed/forked via Proof-of-Work.

Links:

Succinct Atomic Swaps

Makes it possible to perform an atomic swap in merely two (or three) transactions, instead of four. Can work on chains that have no scripting and don't support timelocks.

Links:

Trustless P2P Lending

A trustless contract to borrow one asset, using another asset as collateral. No oracle or arbitrator is required. Works on any blockchain that has multiple assets and sufficient smart contracting capabilities.

Links:

Other posts

Podcast appearances

Miscellaneous videos

Acknowledgements/references

MuSig-DN paper, WabiSabi paper, Inherited IDs paper, Coins paper, Mercury statechain implementation, DLCs + CTV post

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