Bitcoin’s Next Big Software Upgrade to Feature New Language for Crypto Keys

Bitcoin may be hard to use even with consumer-friendly tools, while running its core infrastructure is even harder. However, this isn’t stopping efforts to change that.

The global, volunteer developer group behind the most popular implementation of the software, Bitcoin Core, is soon to debut its 17th major software release, one which puts to code a number of highly-anticipated changes. Of particular emphasis is improving the software’s default wallet, where user’s bitcoin private keys are stored.

Perhaps the most interesting update is the debut of a new “language,” initially proposed by prominent bitcoin contributor Pieter Wuille, known for designing some of the most radical changes to bitcoin in recent years (including Segregated Witness, which helped chip away at bitcoin’s scalability problem last year).

The idea behind the new language is to add important extra information to keys. Or, as Bitcoin Core contributor Andrew Chow put it, it provides a “sane” alternative to the…